Postmates Is Trying to Impress Picky New Yorkers With Its Minimalist Out-of-Home Campaign

As an extension of its “We Get It” campaign, which launched in Los Angeles in January, the work is meant to boost brand awareness. “We first tested [the campaign] in Los Angeles, our biggest market, and the results we saw on the brand awareness and growth side were phenomenal,” said Lizz Niemeyer, director of brand marketing at Postmates. “Bringing this campaign to New York is very important for Postmates, as it’s a more crowded delivery market where we have a lot of opportunity to grow.”

For the New York push, Postmates partnered with six companies—by CHLOE., Halal Guys, Milk Bar, Shake Shack, Tacombi and The Meatball Shop—for posts that were specific to each of those brands.

“New Yorkers are picky, and our internal research shows that New York Postmates users are even pickier,” said Niemeyer. “They aren’t ordering generic burgers; they’re ordering Shake Shack, and, in fact, one in every two burgers we deliver in New York is from Shake Shack. Our partners are a critical part of the Postmates experience, so it felt natural to include them in a campaign for this market.”

By working with specific New York-centric brands on co-branded marketing, Postmates will have other companies sharing the campaign whose customers are “Postmates’ target demographic,” according to Niemeyer.

“Extending the campaign and tailoring it to New York City was a fun challenge and great opportunity to prove how local our ‘We Get it’ tagline could be,” said Jason Rappaport, creative director at 180LA, in a statement. “In order to demonstrate that Postmates truly gets New York, our team did a lot of on-the-ground research before we started writing, and lucky for us, one of our primary copywriters grew up in the city. Hopefully, it all pays off when New Yorkers see the work for themselves. Our research tells us they won’t be shy telling us if it doesn’t.”

As part of the campaign launch, Postmates is offering six weeks of free delivery from its featured restaurant partners. “We wanted to tie-in the offline experience of the campaign into our in-app experience, and this series of free delivery promotions does that in a way that also drives sales for our partners and for Postmates,” said Neimeyer.

Using out-of-home work is crucial for the brand because, “as a tech company, Postmates has always had a very strong digital and social advertising presence, but awareness-level marketing is becoming increasingly more important as the brand matures,” said Niemeyer.

Niemeyer added that OOH is “still one of the best ways to bring your brand to life in a physical way, and we’ve focused our specific media placements for this campaign in areas where consumers have time to read and engage with our advertising in a meaningful way.”

She continued: “Additionally, when the ads are compelling enough, then OOH actually also becomes a channel for social engagement. During the Los Angeles campaign, we saw hundreds of social posts tagging our brand in OOH photos, amplifying their reach way beyond the placements themselves.”