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How DoorDash's CMO Games The Super Bowl

Published 1 month ago11 minute read

It’s time to grab a comfy spot on the couch, prepare your favorite beverages and snacks, and get ready to yell at the TV: . Today’s world may be full of hundreds of channels and feeds serving up a seemingly infinite stream of content, but the Super Bowl still reigns supreme, and just about everyone will be tuned in. According to a poll from consumer research platform Attest, 93% of Americans will be watching the Big Game on Sunday—and doing it from the comfort of either their own couch or the home of friends and family.

Almost half are planning to watch the Super Bowl for the love of the game itself. But , and Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show is the main draw for 34% of viewers. And even though it won’t be an escape from the onslaught of political news (President Donald Trump is planning to attend, after all), Americans are hoping the ads will take their minds off of everything else. Nearly seven in 10 either do not like or are indifferent toward political ads during the game. What do they want? Entertainment. About 56% want ads that are funny, and 40% are interested in celebrity-driven ads. Three in 10 want to see ads with exclusive discount codes, and nearly as many are interested in sweepstakes.

The Super Bowl is known as a time when . And it’s a time when old brands can reinvent themselves, while newer ones can introduce themselves to a large audience. (Temu, anyone?) Attest found that when they think of classic Super Bowl ads, they think of Budweiser first (Whassup Clydesdales?), but then they also think of Pepsi and Nike—two brands that could see a huge bump from the stage Sunday’s game provides.

was DoorDash’s “All the Ads” spot, which gave viewers a chance to win everything that was advertised during the game. It went on to receive the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes last year. I talked to DoorDash CMO Kofi Amoo-Gottfried about that campaign, this year’s ad, and why advertising at the Super Bowl is still so important. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

getty

While high profile moves against diversity and inclusion programs seem to be everywhere, a —as well as many potential consequences of alienating them in corporate policies and marketing. Forbes’ Jabari Young writes about the report, which shows Black consumers’ buying power is set to hit $2.1 trillion by 2026—a 2.4x increase since 2000.

—about 46 hours per week for Black adults—compared to 35 hours per week for the overall U.S. population, with streaming being their preferred delivery method. They also spend an average of 32 hours per week on smartphones and tablets, two more hours than the U.S. population overall. For the most part, those hours are spent tuned to traditional media. Broadcast and cable channels make up about 43% of TV time in Black households, and traditional radio reaches an average of 27.4 million Black adults weekly—more than half of the total population.

Nielsen found that if a brand doesn’t align with the causes they care about. After Target announced it was stepping back from its diversity, equity and inclusion goals, which helped several Black-owned brands get on shelves, several advocacy organizations called for boycotting the retailer.

Harris Faulkner talks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on "The Faulkner Focus" in 2023.

Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

. In January, The Faulkner Focus, a news program hosted by Harris Faulkner, got more viewers than ABC’s women’s roundtable discussion show The View, writes Forbes senior contributor Mark Joyella. Following Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the conservative-leaning station has posted more all-time ratings records, and had the highest-rated January in cable news history. Last month, Fox News Channel had an average prime time audience of 2.8 million viewers, 353,000 of whom were in the 25-54 year-old demographic.

But. The Faulkner Focus didn’t beat it by much—an average of 2.552 million watching Faulkner, versus 2.508 million watching The View. In November, the ABC talk show, which has been on the air since 1997, scored its highest viewership in a decade the day after the presidential election. ABC told Variety in November that the show had been the No. 1 in households and total viewers among daytime broadcast talk shows and news programs for five straight years.

A Clydesdale pushes a Budweiser keg in its 2025 Super Bowl commercial.

Anheuser-Busch

Are you ready for some advertising? , with some breaks for the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles to play football. Forbes senior contributor Pamela Danziger runs down the brands that will be participating, as well as those that are not. More than 10 advertisers dropped out of the Big Game—30-second slots sold for $8 million and up—for various reasons. This year, Doritos, Pringles, Budweiser and Dunkin’ will be on the screen, but there will be no ads from car companies except Jeep and Ram.

For those who want to reminisce about some of the greatest hits of the past, CBS will be tonight. It will focus on the funniest of all time, writes Forbes senior contributor Marc Berman, and give viewers a chance to vote on their own favorites of the past.

DoorDash CMO Kofi Amoo-Gottfried.

DoorDash

DoorDash is always marketing to different audiences—consumers who want delivery, finding “dashers” to make those deliveries, and attracting businesses to participate—but its consumer-focused work at the Super Bowl has earned it quite a bit of notice. I talked to CMO Kofi Amoo-Gottfried about their reasons behind advertising at the Super Bowl, as well as what it accomplishes for the business. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.

We don’t think of it as something that is automatic, so I don’t know that it would necessarily be important to us every year.

The Super Bowl is a massive state. It’s the last national water cooler moment that’s left, where you know for a fact that everyone’s going to be there, and they’re not just watching the game, but watching the ads. It’s the one time of year when people are like: I want to see advertising and I’m going to have an opinion about advertising. Big stage, big audience, highly engaged on the game and in the ads.

If we’re going to do it, we have to have something really important to say as a business, about where the business is today, where the business is going, how the business is changing. We want to be able to bring a piece of new news to market that is reflected in our product. So that drives a lot of how we think about: Should we even show up in this moment? Do we have a new thing that we want to tell the world, that we think is really important, that will drive value for people [and] the business? If all of that’s true, are we going to have the product ready? Will the product itself actually be able to stand up to that promise? If all of those things end up being true, then for us it feels really compelling to show up.

There’s a lot said about how expensive the Super Bowl is. It’s not cheap, but if you think about it, there’s no other media buy that exists at that scale—and then if you do it incredibly well, at the level of earned impressions that you can generate. Last year at the Super Bowl, the campaign generated 12 billion impressions. If you just evaluated it on a cost-per-impression basis, it would be cheap. Where else can we spend $7 million and get 12 billion impressions?

Every year is different, but we always try to work backwards from: What are we trying to accomplish as a business and what value can we create? Last year, the thing we were trying to accomplish as a business was cement this notion that you can get anything on DoorDash. We need to grow that perception from just a survey perspective, but also [it] also needs to show up in behavior. You want to drive awareness—you can get anything on DoorDash—and then we wanted to drive trials of non-restaurant things on DoorDash. That’s what we were trying to accomplish for the business.

From a consumer perspective, we felt we could help people understand this: This place that they already come to, and are relying on for some things, can do other things for them that ends up creating value. That was the notion that we went into it with.

As is typical in a creative process, you kick about a bunch of ideas for a while, and then we got to this place: Look, if we’re trying to convince everyone that DoorDash delivers everything, why don’t we just figure out a way to deliver everything from the Super Bowl? It’s also one of those ideas that the first time you hear it, you go: That’s pure. It’s great and it’s going to be incredibly painful. And all of those things were true, because we had to convince 76 other brands in the Super Bowl to participate. We had to get our legal teams and our engineering teams. We had to build a sweepstakes that hadn’t been done before. Everything about it was net new.

This year is about a subscription product, which is DashPass. DashPass has north of 15 million paid subscribers. You pay 10 bucks a month and we discount delivery and service fees. On average, customers save about $5 in every order, which means it pays for itself in two orders. For people that are frequent users of DoorDash, this is the most affordable way to use DoorDash.

When we think about what customer problems we’ll be solving, we know affordability is super important. It’s particularly important in the context of the macroeconomic environment over the past two years or so, given high inflation and all of these things. The message we bring into the Super Bowl is: We want to introduce or reintroduce DashPass to people, and help them understand that DashPass is going to be a way for you to save money. If you are a person who cares about the convenience that DoorDash offers, this is the single best way to do it. We think there’s a very clear customer problem here. There’s a very clear business opportunity here, and that’s the message for this year.

The way we think about it is that each year is its own animal, and the job to be done is different each year. The tools you want to leverage to do that job are different each year. Last year called for a sort of engagement mechanic. This year calls for more of a storytelling mechanic.

We try to not get trapped. At the end of last year, after we came out of the Super Bowl, the team was like, ‘Oh my God, how are we going to top ourselves?’ And I was like, ‘That’s the absolute wrong question. It has nothing to do with you.’ On the other side of this is a consumer, and on one side of it is a business that’s trying to accomplish something. Those are the only things that matter. And each year you have to take those things in the first principle’s way and go: What’s the best answer for this problem set? Which will not necessarily be the right answer for the last problem set.

I’m super excited about this year’s campaign. I think it’ll generate the results that we want, which is ultimately all I care about.

While Super Bowl ads are exciting, there are some on Sunday, too.

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QUIZ

How much is hip hop superstar Kendrick Lamar being paid for Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show?

A. $10,000

B. $3 million

C. Nothing

D. Artists bid on the halftime show, and he paid $5 million

See if you got the answer right here.

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