DoorDash is America’s go-to for delivering local delights and serving the nation. DoorDash has 310,000 menus and 55,000+ grocery, convenience, and retail stores across 4,000+ cities in the US, Canada, and Australia.
For 18 months, Global Influencer Marketing Agency Digital Voices has partnered with DoorDash to drive brand awareness, creatively inspire, and authentically engage with Gen Z on TikTok and Instagram. The success of our always-on partnership was recognized with a Silver Honor for Brand Awareness Campaign in the 16th Shorty Awards.
This Father’s Day, the goal was to rethink the approach to gifting, putting the focus on cherishing time with family. Traditional Father’s Day gifts often include the usual suspects: whisky, socks, or tools. But what a Dad truly craves is quality time with their loved ones.
Our challenge was to convince families that the perfect Father’s Day gift wasn’t just something you could pick up at a store – it was a thoughtfully chosen item, delivered by DoorDash, that would free up time for memorable moments.
Our goal was to drive traffic to the DoorDash app, specifically targeting wives of fathers and their Gen Z children. KPIs included:
Through the power of Influencer Marketing, our objective was to create relatable content that resonated deeply with both parents and children, showcasing that quality gifts and family moments go hand in hand.
Our approach centered on creating a diverse, heartfelt, and authentic campaign that reflected the true spirit of Father’s Day. We enlisted a diverse group of nine influencers – Macro (500k-1m) and Mid-Tier (100k - 500k) – 77% of whom were from underrepresented communities. This ensured we could connect with a wide range of audiences and showcase the many different forms of family life.
We identified two key target audiences. Our primary was Millennial Women (28-44), representing the largest share of wallet. This audience tends to gift both their fathers and partners, while also being the primary grocery and hosting shoppers for their households. They typically spend an average of $100 on gifts alone. The secondary target was Gen Z (12-27). We discovered that 90% of Gen-Z planned to celebrate their dads and 64% planned to buy their dad a gift at an average value of $50.
Our strategy included a mix of organic and paid social posts, with content shared on Meta and TikTok. Creators crafted stories around the theme of Father’s Day as an opportunity to create meaningful moments, rather than just focusing on material gifts.
The Paid targeting was tailored primarily towards mothers on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The highest-performing organic content was boosted to drive further reach and consideration toward a bespoke target audience.
Our activation team hosted onboarding calls with the creators to discuss creative thought starters. While we empower creators to bring in their true-to-style concepts and ideas, providing creative pillars served to guide content themes and overall messaging for this campaign.
Content went live in June 2024, ahead of Father’s Day on June 16th. Influencers like The Leighton Show and Natalie & the Aguilars brought humor and relatability, sharing real-life moments of family connection that had the audience laughing and nodding along. They used their unique voices to show how DoorDash helped make Father’s Day less about rushing to the store and more about enjoying quality time together.
Meanwhile, Jesse Sullivan, a mega-creator and transgender parent, added a deeply emotional layer to the campaign by sharing his personal experience of Father’s Day, emphasizing inclusivity and highlighting the importance of making the day memorable for everyone, no matter their family structure.
We amplified the reach of the content through paid social, using TikTok Spark Ads and boosted posts to ensure our message reached our two core segments: moms and Gen Z. The creatives were optimized for each platform, and we ran each creator’s content as boosted ads on Instagram and TikTok. We found this helped minimize ad fatigue, and through platform auto-optimization, we achieved better-than-expected results.
It was essential to ensure the content felt authentic across a diverse group of influencers while balancing the inclusion of key talking points for paid amplification. Storytelling meant allowing influencers to showcase the brand in ways true to their style, while a clear brief and onboarding ensured significant inclusion of the DoorDash brand, and Father’s Day gifting messaging. This thoughtful approach delivered content that resonated and achieved exceptional results.
This Father’s Day, in partnership with DoorDash, we redefined gift-giving by shifting perceptions of how and where to shop for the occasion. The campaign demonstrated that an app often associated with food delivery could successfully inspire purchases across retail categories, proving its versatility as a shopping platform.
The campaign helped DoorDash achieve its second-best retail day ever – this was the only social campaign running at the time, emphasizing the power of our creative strategy.
We drove:
What was particularly impressive was the campaign’s organic reach was nearly as strong as the paid social amplification. This was a unique outcome and further highlighted the power of authentic influencer content.
The paid social portion performed exceptionally well as well, exceeding platform forecasts. We saw:
Additionally, we saw an overwhelmingly positive response in the form of 95% positive comment sentiment, proving the campaign connected emotionally with the audience and left a lasting impact.
This Father’s Day, we not only redefined gift-giving but our campaign proved that with the right message and diverse voices, a brand can truly affect people’s behaviors and perceptions.
