The brief was simple; to help promote Deliveroo UAE’s commitment to delivery service quality and training — and therefore their commitment to bringing food in the best quality possible. Like any food aggregator, Deliveroo doesn’t make the food, their offering centres around aggregating the best places, offering an easy UX, and of course the delivery of the food. In this brief, we wanted to show it’s not just a game of who has the most or best restaurants or best app — it’s about who can bring food with the best service and quality. We therefore knew strategically we wanted to highlight the importance of the “delivery” in this campaign.

We started with a very simple insight — no matter what, a dish is only as good as how it's delivered. It doesn’t matter how good the chef is, the restaurant, the ingredients or the cookery of a dish — if it is delivered badly, it’s ruined.

In short, the delivery itself is a vitally important ingredient in the dish. Bumped smashed, dropped, late — there are dozens of ways to ruin a dish in transit. And then what arrives is often a new creation — dishes mixed in the bag, or soggy from an open drink, or cold, or smashed up.

We realized there’s a whole world of deliveries disasters out there which resulted in new and unique dishes that were an amalgamation of the original dish and the unexpected twist of the unique disaster it had experienced. This was fertile territory for a unique, eye catching, tongue-in-cheek campaign.

The medium through which we chose to deploy this campaign was crucial in emphasizing the importance of the role of delivery- communicating via a conventional campaign would not give the problem the gravitas it deserved. And so we chose a medium inextricably linked with high quality food and those who take it seriously- the cookbook.

And like-wise we continued the facetiousness in our approach to drive PR through food-relevant 'foodie' influencers simultaneously with comedy content creators.

We created The One-Star Cookbook. A collection of 36 unique dishes inspired by real online one-star reviews of delivery disasters. Through humor and beautiful craft, we knew we could bring a new way to showcase not the dishes we strove to deliver, but those we strive not to deliver. And in turn, reinforce how important the delivery (and such a committed delivery partner as Deliveroo) is to each dish. Each dish was designed and written with the same level of detail as any high end cookbook, where each dish can be recreated with the delivery mistake central to the recipe.

We promoted the book through social media, and distributed it to influencers to promote it, which led to a website where they could order it for free or view the recipes online. We also distributed 10K copies to Deliveroo customers to get the conversation going.

We promoted the book through social media, and distributed it to food influencers and bloggers to promote it, which led to a website where they could order it for free or view the recipes online. We also distributed 10K copies to Deliveroo customers to get the conversation going.

The book clearly struck a chord with people, with over 30,000 books ordered. Another 64,000 visited the website to view the online version.

On social people engaged with the campaign, getting 528K engagements and a17% organic reach, 3 times the industry average. Some fans even followed the recipes and recreated the dishes!

And most importantly, the brand saw an uplift in its Brand Health Tracker on metrics such as ‘Reliability’ by +7pts and “A Brand For Me” by +5pts.