Grubhub Strikes Gold With a Memorable New Ad 

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The online food delivery market is notoriously competitive, and while brand-building is vital you also have to battle at the level of sales performance and branding cut-through. You have to spark a response that’s tied firmly to your brand – a generalized hunger for take-out won’t do. The last thing you want is for your advertising to funnel dollars to the competition.

Grubhub’s ad with agency Anomaly for its Grubhub+ premium program does a great job of preventing that, by creating positive sales demand allied to strong brand recognition. It’s a performance-oriented ad which makes its case via entertainment.

The ad spotlights Grubhub+’s “Gold Days” promotional offer with free food and massive deals, available only to members of the Grubhub+ service. But with Gold Days come Gold Diggers, and our unfortunate hero Gary finds that everyone in the neighborhood suddenly has lustful eyes for the big Grubhub bag he’s had delivered. Even the local pigeons want a piece when it’s Gold Digging Season. Luckily Gary can get indoors and safely enjoy his take-out.

The ad puts deals front and centre and has a strong promotional emphasis, but it still aims to entertain. And that’s important: humor is a good way of helping ads and brands stick in the brain, and it stops Grubhub getting lost in a forest of promotional ads from other brands.

We can see the results when we look at “Gold Digger Season”’s performance on the Test Your Ad platform. For long-term potential the ad comes in a little over the category average. But that’s not the most important element here. This ad is aiming to excel on short-term Spike Rating and on Brand Fluency, which measures speed and accuracy of recognition.

These are areas where the category as a whole is somewhat weak, with only a modest average Spike Rating and Brand Fluency for Food Delivery Services ads. Grubhub’s commercial easily beats those norms, with a Strong performance in both areas. What’s particularly impressive is Fast Fluency, which measures how many viewers pick up on the ad within the opening seconds. For the category as a whole this is only 60%, but for Grubhub it’s an exceptional 78%, with overall Fluency rising to 91%. In other words, even in a high-skip or low-attention environment, Grubhub’s ad is still excellently branded.

The ad’s slightly edgy humor works to its advantage too, with another norm-beating score in Emotional Intensity, one of the vital components of our short-term Spike predictor. Whether audiences love or dread the gold diggers coming for Gary’s deals, they create some level of emotion, and that builds memory. In a crowded category, Grubhub’s irreverent approach is earning it attention.