Inside the Audacious Attempt to DoorDash the Entire Super Bowl

Lawyers, creatives, CMOs, even the NFL front office.

And for good reason. If you’re going to pull off arguably the most ambitious giveaway in Super Bowl history, you need no shortage of friends in high places.

DoorDash will use its 30-second ad in the Super Bowl to reveal how to win every item advertised in a nationally broadcast spot during the Super Bowl. Yes, that means the brand is dashing one lucky winner a 2024 BMW i5 All-Electric, a 2024 Kia EV9, a Volkswagen, a pallet of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, a thousand wings from Popeyes (ordered at the winner’s convenience, naturally) and dozens more supersized prizes. The brand will even toss in a 30-pound jug of mayonnaise.

It’s all part of DoorDash’s calculated push to persuade consumers that DoorDash can be “Your Door to More.” In other words, the brand doesn’t want to be seen just as a delivery vehicle for local goods, but rather, as a company that can make your life easier and better. After selecting Wieden+Kennedy to build the new brand platform in September, the agency and DoorDash’s in-house creative studio, Superette, began working on the unprecedented sweepstakes in November. To deliver an all-encompassing experience for consumers, Amoo-Gottfried has had to work seamlessly across his organization, his agency, other brands and the NFL to ensure everything is done by the book.

“We want consumers to think of DoorDash for all things like dashing NyQuil during cold and flu season or thinking DoorDash for flowers on Valentine’s Day,” Amoo-Gottfried said. “We want to get to the point where it’s just a default reflex.”

Making DoorDash an ingrained habit for consumers means elevating its brand positioning to evolve how DoorDash fits in a person’s life.

Elevating the brand platform

Tony Xu, Andy Fang, Stanley Tang and Evan Moore founded DoorDash as PaloAltoDelivery.com a decade ago. They interviewed hundreds of small-business owners in Palo Alto, Calif., and overwhelming found the biggest problem plaguing them was delivery.

“They wanted to empower local businesses to reach local communities,” Amoo-Gottfried said. “That’s always been the DNA of the company.”

The group started with restaurant takeout. Initially, they made the deliveries themselves, a tradition that continues today: Every DoorDash employee—even Xu, who is still CEO, and Amoo-Gottfried—makes a handful of deliveries each year.

“[Restaurants] are the hardest one to get right. If you can solve the most frequent use case, you can use that system to basically do everything else,” Amoo-Gottfried said.

Our legal department? I love them. Because their job, as they understand it, is to help you get to yes, not say no.

Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, DoorDash CMO

And “do everything else” is what DoorDash is trying. It has expanded into other verticals like grocery and retail. You can even have a UPS parcel picked up off your porch. The brand’s Super Bowl efforts in 2021 and 2023 spotlighted the new verticals to encourage users to adopt new habits within the app.

Following its 2023 Super Bowl ad, awareness that the DoorDash platform offers groceries increased 17% from Q4 in 2022 to Q2 in 2023.

2024 represents an opportunity to pivot consumers’ perception of the brand from delivery to 24/7 personal assistant, as Henry Lambert, group strategy director at Wieden+Kennedy, described it to Adweek.

“As you look at the breadth of what DoorDash can do for you, you see there’s huge potential to be more than just delivering things, but to actually help you live a better life,” Lambert said.

But changing consumer perception of your brand requires a big idea, perhaps one that no one has ever attempted in the nearly 60-year history of the Super Bowl.

The big idea

DoorDashing the entire Super Bowl was not Wieden+Kennedy’s first idea, according to Mariota Essery, the executive creative director for Superette.

“What we saw in [Wieden’s] second little Hail Mary idea was a nugget that transcended past just a 30-second TV commercial,” Essery said, adding that the campaign gives DoorDash a chance to push something bigger, braver and more exciting.

The brand’s first teaser reveals the enormity of the sweepstakes. With a voice-over from actor Laurence Fishburne, consumers learn they can take home everything advertised during the Super Bowl, from tax services to fast food to who knows what else. The teaser also reveals a promo code will be key to the contest.

“You should feel the audacity of the idea without having to get involved in it,” said Bertie Scrase, a Wieden+Kennedy creative director on the DoorDash account.

The DoorDash and Wieden+Kennedy teams cannot reveal many creative details about the final spot yet, other than the promo code will be unexpectedly elaborate.

“It’ll be a spot that people will pause and rewind during the Super Bowl,” said Christen Brestrup, another Wieden+Kennedy creative director on the DoorDash account.

The agency tapped Mike Diva, an Emmy-nominated director who has worked on SNL and produced music videos for Lil Nas X, Doja Cat and The Lonely Island, to bring it to life. The team chose to produce the spot using CGI because as new advertisers enter the game, they need to adjust on the fly. Shooting at the last second or reshooting over and over again were options the team ruled out almost immediately.

With the idea in place, this is where the connections Amoo-Gottfried has built within his organization and with other CMOs came into play.

It takes a village

A campaign like this is most effective if a large number of consumers are aware of the sweepstakes before the game even begins so that DoorDash is front and center in viewers’ minds during every ad break.

“What made the idea more exhilarating was thinking about how people are going to watch the Super Bowl ads and think, ‘Wait, they’re going to deliver that car,'” said Dan Viens, head of creative for Bodega, Wieden+Kennedy’s social studio.

To promote the sweepstakes effectively, Amoo-Gottfried needed buy-in from other brands. By mid-January, he had already spoken to some 20 CMOs to get their permission to be involved in the promotion of the sweepstakes. As consumers can see from the teaser, there was no shortage of brands who wanted in.

As brands enter the game, the DoorDash team will share updates on social indicating the brand “has been added to cart,” Viens said. Bodega has about 12 to 15 employees working on the campaign, creating organic interactions between the brands. (About 30 Wieden+Kennedy employees total are helping execute the spot.)

DoorDash will also work with influencers on TikTok in niche communities to amplify the campaign. “We’ll invite people through this campaign to become brand evangelists as they really help us co-author this DoorDash story,” said Lanae Spruce, Bodega’s head of creative strategy.

With so many people touching this campaign, maintaining a consistent brand voice has been key. So Spruce said they received a set of parameters from DoorDash’s legal team.

Built on trust

A Super Bowl idea this big means every department within DoorDash plays a role, including its legal squad. Luckily, proactive lawyers are built into DoorDash’s organization.

“Our legal department? I love them. Because their job, as they understand it, is to help you get to yes, not say no,” Amoo-Gottfried said. “That’s the brief that they have down from our CEO: Your job is to help the team figure it out.”

Getting approval from Amoo-Gottfried’s CEO wasn’t hard either. “My conversation with my CEO was literally in a one-on-one with no deck and went something like, ‘We’re doing Super Bowl. Here’s what my thinking was.’ [Xu:] ‘Sounds great.'”

The organization values brand-building alongside performance, something many brands are losing sight of in a climate where short-term sales are everything. “This notion of brand versus performance is, in a lot of ways, a false choice,” Amoo-Gottfried said.

Across the company, many departments, including product and merchandising, will play vital roles to ensure DoorDash users get the right experience in the app to enforce the campaign. The engineers will also be busy keeping the sweepstakes website running on Super Bowl Sunday after it’s flooded with traffic.

And that website is the one thing that’s keeping Amoo-Gottfried up at night. Because if that goes down, it’ll “gum up the whole operation.”

To ease his nerves on Super Bowl Sunday, Amoo-Gottfried will have plenty of colleagues who can live out the spirit of the new brand platform and DoorDash him anything.

Nothing says “Your Door to More” than DoorDashing a bottle of nice bourbon, the CMO’s drink of choice, to celebrate the night the company tries the unthinkable.

Supersized Sweepstakes

Five notable Super Bowl sweepstakes that paved the way for DoorDash’s audacious plan.

Doritos

Why make your own ad when fans will gladly do it for you? Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign ran eight times from 2006 to 2016 and handed out prizes up to $1 million for the winning concept. Fans competed each year to make their own spot and win a fan vote to have it run during the Super Bowl. The campaign led to iconic spots like “Doritos Dogs” and “Time Machine.”

Esurance

Any brand can give away money for the Super Bowl, but finding a way to tie it to a brand’s narrative is the hard part. For Esurance, that meant finding a hack to have a Super Bowl ad and save money in the process. Sure, Esurance didn’t advertise during the 2014 game, but it bought the first ad after the game, saving 30%. The Office star John Krasinski told viewers if they tweeted #EsuranceSave30, they’d have a chance to win the $1.5 million the brand saved. And viewers delivered: 5.4 million tweets made it the talk of the Super Bowl.

Expensify

One way to get consumers to download your app is promise prizes if you use the app while the spot is airing. In a rare B2B ad in the Super Bowl, Expensify gave away prizes to viewers who snapped photos of the receipts to products in the ad, which starred rapper 2 Chainz and actor Adam Scott. The 2019 ad helped pave the path for interactive Super Bowl ads.

Mountain Dew

In 2021, Mountain Dew walked so DoorDash could run. But unlike DoorDash, which gives viewers until the end of the night to participate in its contest, Mountain Dew channeled Talladega Nights’ Ricky Bobby’s motto: “If you’re not first, you’re last.” Mountain Dew gave away $1 million to the first person to correctly guess how many soda bottles were in its spot. In total, the brand hid 243 bottles of Mountain Dew Major Melon in the ad.

Molson Coors

Through a partnership with DraftKings, Molson Coors allowed viewers to bet on the outcome of its 2023 Super Bowl ad that featured both Miller Lite and Coors Light. Viewers could win portions of a $500,000 jackpot with the right bets on details like the bartender’s outfit and whether the Coors Silver Bullet Express train would appear. Ultimately, Molson Coors revealed it was actually a Blue Moon ad.

For the latest Super Bowl 58 advertising news—who’s in, who’s out, teasers, full ads and more—check out Adweek’s Super Bowl 2024 Ad Tracker and the rest of our stories here. And join us on the evening of Feb. 11 for the best in-game coverage of the commercials.