Food for thought: Just Eat CMO Mat Braddy discusses how the brand’s next campaign will use Vine and a lighter tone

Having just appointed its first UK marketing director, Just Eat CMO Mat Braddy discussed the new campaign set to roll out in the coming months, being rebellious, its future use of social and slapping Antony Worrall Thompson with a fish.

Just Eat, the challenger brand online takeaway ordering service that partners with over 18,000 restaurants across the UK, has had a busy few years of expansion, which it expects to continue as it primes a new marketing campaign in the coming weeks, which will include the use of Vine Videos, reveals chief marketing officer Mat Braddy. 2012 saw the brand launch a £5m marketing campaign trying to persuade the public not to cook, which saw the kidnapping of chef Antony Worrall Thompson, who was then, to many viewers' delight, slapped with a fish.“There’s only so many times you can say ‘celebrity chefs suck’. There’s quite a lot of ways you can say that, but we’ve had a year of saying that, so we’re looking to evolve it now,” Braddy explains as he discusses the campaign and his plans for the rest of the year.“We’re always looking and learning and changing things, and we’ve had a year of being anti-cooking so it’s like ‘OK, what else can we play with’?“Some of the stuff we’ve done has been a little bit dark, like kidnapping a man on television. That was great, but then you look around and see other things like the dancing pony and think ‘ah, actually, they’re much lighter and maybe we should be a bit nicer as opposed to always kidnapping people’."Braddy explains that the rebrand of the company last year looked to position Just Eat as mischievous and light, with "a bit of a rebellious streak".As well as seeing Worrall Thompson kidnapped, hit with a fish and having his chest waxed (The Drum can reveal exclusively that the waxing was faked), the campaign also saw brand character Mr Mozzarella run in the Corby by-election. However, this hadn’t gone down quite how Just Eat hoped: “We thought we’d get a little bit in trouble but it was embraced. What we had forgotten is that by-elections are really boring to cover if you’re a journalist, and all these BBC journalists are stuck in Corby, which is the middle of nowhere as they are concerned, and they’re stuck there for two or three days in a community centre watching people talk about policies.”Braddy said he has attempted to broaden the marketing mix at the brand, and has fully embraced the possibilities that social media can play for Just Eat. “Advertising and marketing can be quite limiting…it’s all about social and two screens and all that buzzword bingo these days, so really we really wanted to be a campaigning brand and get that campaigning energy not just in the ads, but in all of our emails, social, mobile advertising, retail marketing, and the rest.”Social plays a big role in Just Eat’s current strategy, with the brand using Radian6 to help it with social listening, both in terms of marketing and customer feedback and engagement. “Generally, what having the brand personality does for us on social is it gives you a spike for engaging content. In-house we have writers creating enough content for a mini magazine, because we need so much content for Facebook and Twitter. Having that kind of clear brand vision can be useful.”As well as looking to tweet engaging content and chat with fans Braddy explained that Just Eat also follows trends in tweets.“A great example is we use the [Radian6] tool to search for terms like ‘hungry’ and ‘eat’. People saying ‘I’m hungry’ at about 10am in the morning, which is interesting to us because we’re an evening brand, and that will inform what kind of tweets we might be doing about 10am – should we be doing more of a push for lunch orders, what should our engagement be in the mornings?“That’s really actionable information that we can pull out of that, and that can affect our marketing strategy."The marketing team has also hired a customer service social media team, to ensure that its 9 million registered members voices are heard and engaged with. “They sit in customer services, and we have a session with them every week and we train them and we really use our planning so that we always know what we’re doing, they understand tone of voice, and they’re doing a really good job now,” he explains. “We’re one of Socialbakers' Socially Devoted brands, which means we respond to about 96 per cent of our incoming queries from social media, and most of those within ten minutes. That’s fantastic, that’s a statistic we’re really proud of: not just happy people, if they’ve got problems we try to help them out.”Social will also be integrated into the company’s future marketing campaign plans, which will go live before the end of this year, and will include Vine videos, Braddy reveals. “We’ve got a really nice plan for the second half of the year, which I can’t tell you yet, we’ve got some great new TV ads coming out, but we’ve got a social idea for the second half and we’ll be using Vine videos, which we’ve not done too much of yet, because it’s a new thing and we’re trying to use that in a rebellious, fun way, but we’ve had quite a good idea on how we can do that.”He says the brand is always aiming to learn and improve, and cites the use of mobile apps as being “huge for us.”“By the start of next year, mobile will be our most popular method for people using Just Eat to order, and you know, we’ve had millions of people installing apps already, and it’s only our first year of giving apps a really good push.“There’s a huge amount of people who are sat on the settee. They’re sitting, watching the TV with their smartphone, they don’t even have to go to the kitchen. You don’t need a kitchen any more. "This is what we keep campaigning about! If you get rid of kitchens everyone’s got room for a sauna in your house, or a gym. So get rid of your kitchen! Just have an app in the corner for Just Eat and that’s you sorted, isn’t it?” Braddy encourages. “We obviously do get people on their way home from work… but it’s way more people – way more – who just use their phone to process their order,” he adds. Late last month Just Eat announced the promotion of Lucy Milne as its first marketing director, having previously served as head of trade marketing since 2011.