This work transformed the way people think of and relate to DoorDash–from simply a food delivery service, to a brand that can deliver pretty much anything on the fly. The campaign subverted every aspect of the Super Bowl earned media experience, hijacking the big game’s media blitz to capture imaginations across TikTok, Instagram, and X feeds, the morning news, and Super Bowl parties around the country. This year was the most-watched Super Bowl in history, and many missed the historic overtime to instead focus on DoorDash’s massive delivery.

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.

We needed to give every single person tuning into the Super Bowl a reason to be invested in the game. Not just for the teams playing, but for the big, cryptic prize our teaser foreshadowed - a delivery of all the products advertised during the Super Bowl.

So we started two weeks before the big game by turning a hilarious and entertaining influencer into a first-of-its-kind ad reporter, aka Dashspondent. His job was to anchor the campaign and keep everyone updated on the sweepstakes and all the winnable items.

On game day, as ads aired we quickly chose a prize in real time, comped up an image, wrote tweet copy, and fired off posts all game long in an ever-growing prize Thread on X. And after our spot, Lonnie helped fans unravel the code on TikTok and Instagram live.

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, with our subculture influencers leaving comments to ignite participation. 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 mark, our ad aired, and we drove sweeps participation through a live code stream on TikTok and Instagram.

In the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, DoorDash launched a teaser explaining their promotion. Then, every time another advertiser launched their campaign or talked about their Super Bowl efforts, DoorDash would add a related item to the cart, whether it was a BMW or 60lbs of mayo. They then amplified these efforts through subculture-specific influencers to build excitement and organic conversation around the final prize cart. These efforts made their way to newsdesks all over the country, including the Today Show, and by the time the Super Bowl started, excitement was at a fever pitch. The conversation continued post-game, too–social media and the news cycle spent days clamoring for the winner.

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