How Grubhub and Known won hearts, stomachs and awards with 'That Grubhub Feeling'

The brief

Grubhub went to Known with a clear objective, to win the hearts and stomachs of consumers with a distinctive visual look and a scalable creative campaign. And to drive brand relevance and affinity for Grubhub amongst diners.

With UberEats, Postmates and Slice, they have clear competition. But its core differentiators are that they’re all about food, food from your favorite, local spots, not household items and dog food.

Grubhub realized its messaging had become disjointed. They needed a north star that could act as a reset and something that they could build equity and branding internally and externally. They also wanted to amplify the Grubhub guarantee that the best price and on-time delivery with every meal.

The idea

Grubhub and Known wanted to create a campaign that would highlight the feeling of satisfaction when Grubhub delivers exactly what their customer’s been craving. Putting a name to that emotion, ‘That Grubhub Feeling’ was born.

While most of Grubhub’s competitors leaned heavily into ‘food porn’ for their ads, Grubhub realized they had an opportunity to drive themselves as the catalyst for that amazing, positive, and satisfying feeling when you get the food you really want. So they started creating new, positive words into the dining lexico like ‘chewphoria’ that would replace the negative feeling of ‘hangry’.

With already-booked OOH space they released teaser campaigns, describing those food feelings without giving away their new terms. These were emotions everyone could relate to but didn’t have a word for...yet.

When the full campaign was ready for launch, the OOH teaser campaign boosted their full rollout of seven national commercial spots, four radio scripts, and a second OOH campaign in NYC including subways, buses, and cabs. This gave Grubhub an unprecedented chance to blanket the city twice for a single campaign. It was the perfect one-two punch.

The results

The response to That Grubhub Feeling campaign solidified how their two-part OOH strategy led to impressive results.

The campaign had above-average purchase intent and drove more interest than any of Grubhub’s previous four campaigns. And while this was initially intended as a bridge campaign for Q1, ‘That Grubhub Feeling’ was renewed for Q2 and Q3 after resounding success with customers. The media was just as ‘eggzilerated’ by ‘That Grubhub Feeling’ with coverage in Ad Age, Shots, Reel 360, Little Black Book and more.

This campaign was a winner at The Drum Awards for Out of Home 2022. You can see all the winners here. The Drum Awards for Marketing are currently open for entry. Find out how you can enter now.