Our campaign developed an influencer strategy to create a world where winning the Super Bowl was possible not only for the two teams on the field but one lucky person determined enough to solve and enter our ad’s 1,813-character long promo code. We needed to create hype and FOMO around the journey from ad to microsite. So, we deployed some DoorDash-loving influencers to anchor the campaign with enticing reports on the cart’s unbelievable prizes and scale. Their pre-game and gameday content sent the internet into a code-solving frenzy, hijacking attention from celebrities and other brands to redirect it to @DoorDash.

The delivery service landscape is cluttered and undifferentiated - which is a damn big problem when your business relies on being the first app people open when they need something. Competitors have relied on celebrities and huge media spend to create awareness. But DoorDash needed a smarter, more sustainable strategy. In addition, DoorDash was known primarily for restaurant delivery. But to drive the business it needed to grow beyond this into grocery, convenience, health, and beyond.

Super Bowl commercials are an American cultural institution, with huge emphasis placed on their entertainment value and memorability. But they’re also the most cluttered advertising space in the world. With huge budgets and huge creative brain power pointed at winning this single moment in time. We realized that entertaining people for 30 seconds in the Super Bowl wasn’t enough. That we needed to engage with them for the two weeks leading up to the game and beyond.

The world knows DoorDash for restaurant delivery, but in order to grow their business, they needed to expand to new categories. With their new brand platform, Your Door to More, we wanted to showcase their ability to deliver just about anything. And to ensure the brand would be top of mind for more than just food, we needed a high-octane way to launch this new positioning on social.

We had two main objectives. First, we needed a memorable, engaging way to show consumers DoorDash delivers seemingly anything. Second, we needed to keep the internet talking about DoorDash, non-stop. And we would need to accomplish both of those tasks during a time when the world’s best-class brands are all vying for attention with star-studded casts.

The idea was breathtakingly simple: DoorDash would deliver all the products advertised in the Super Bowl.

But it was also incredibly audacious.

Delivering the Super Bowl required rethinking every part of the comms ecosystem, including influencer strategy and use of social media platforms in real-time. To truly change how consumers saw the brand, simply watching a :30 spot wouldn’t be enough. DoorDash would need to divert the nation’s attention from the biggest sports moment of the year, and get people to engage directly with DoorDash instead. And we did that by creating a multi-platform social approach that made our campaign unmissable across our priority platforms: TikTok, Instagram, and X.

Our strategy was to hijack Super Bowl social conversation and redirect attention to DoorDash’s campaign with our Dashspondent, subculture influencers, and reactive moments. The data told us when we needed to show up – conversation surrounding commercial hype picked up about 3 weeks ahead of Super Bowl Sunday and reactions peaked in the first half.

On game day, our Dashspondent updated fans on the growing prize cart and reminded them that they could be the second big game winner. Our subculture influencers posted comments to ignite participation. We jumped into real-time game day conversations and redirected attention back to DoorDash through a live pinned tweet that added an item from every single ad to our DoorDash cart. In the fourth quarter, at the two-minute mark, our ad aired and we drove additional sweeps participation through a live code stream on TikTok and Instagram.

Our Dashspondent introduced our campaign on TikTok and Instagram two weeks before the big game. His announcement followed our ad’s cryptic teaser that got people questioning if DoorDash was serious about its commitment or just pulling a marketing stunt. In his first post, Lonnie legitimized our message, shared the sweepstakes’ specifics, and told his followers to stay tuned for updates on the prize cart.

Because algorithms aren’t easy to crack, we casted influencers in different subcultural categories (cars, gaming, music, sports and food) to make the campaign unmissable.

On game day, we jumped into real-time conversations and redirected attention back to DoorDash through a live pinned tweet that added an item from every single ad to our DoorDash cart. In the fourth quarter, at the two-minute warning, our ad aired and we drove sweeps participation through a live code stream on TikTok and Instagram.

Using industry standards and comparable Super Bowl case studies, we developed benchmarks for our efforts and the campaign delivered: earned impressions beat our targets by 200%, earned social impressions by 150%, and influencer impressions surpassed targets by 1250%:

- 149.5MM Influencer Impressions

- 8MM+ Submissions

- 30.2K Social Mentions

- 23K Follower Increase Across Platforms

- 20+ Brands Participated

But the most impressive results were the UGC:

- People reacted to the length of the code

- Participants shared their entry receipt

- People adapted the dashed code format to their own post copy

- In less than an hour people leaked the code on Reddit and Twitter

- Many people missed the game’s overtime because they were trying to decipher the code