Uber Eats creates cultural moment to celebrate Ramadan, here's how
As part of its 'Always On' campaign food delivey service Uber Eats chose the Islamic festival of Ramadan to bring its brand promise to life and support Muslims fasting during the period of celebration. The innovative campaign won the Regional award at The Drum Awards for Out of Home. Here is the award-winning case study.
To shift selection perception, Uber Eats launched an always-on campaign in early 2022 that communicated the quality and range of Uber Eats’ selection. Then, in Q2, we were challenged to refresh the campaign to deliver on the brand proposition that ‘Uber Eats helps you get anything, effortlessly’.
Strategy: To bring this proposition to life, we wanted to leverage a cultural moment where food was central and timing was key. By doing so, we could appeal directly to an engaged and receptive audience, and avoid having to be everywhere, all the time, in order to cut through.
The holy month of Ramadan, being the biggest celebration in the Islamic calendar, gave us an opportunity to deliver on just that. Fasting is at the heart of Ramadan, signifying spiritual discipline, but it’s also a time of celebration and joy, with food playing a huge role in bringing people together. In fact, the consumption of food content actually spikes during this time.
Fasting from sunrise to sunset, with Iftar as breakfast, observant Muslims will be checking the time of sunset every day, as it changes and varies by location. We took that insight and made it into a data-led DOOH campaign for Uber Eats to help make breaking fast more effortless during this religious festival.
As sunset times change daily and vary by location, our ‘Iftar Incoming’ campaign lets people know when sunset is where they are, every day of Ramadan, using dynamic DOOH. We used solar calendar data - sunset times - that were specific to hundreds of locations across the UK, and this informed the creative delivery of our campaign. To be as robust and effective as possible, this data was approved by the British Council of Muslims.
This data, combined with our specifically chosen locations, resulted in a detailed media plan that saw the campaign appear across the high indexing cities of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol. All of these locations showcased the one piece of information all observant Muslims would need that specific day: the exact sunset time where they were. This made sure that the campaign was genuinely useful, direct, and directly relevant to the client’s business.
Data was at the heart of this campaign, giving Uber Eats a useful purpose throughout Ramadan - with the ability to schedule a sunset delivery via the Uber Eats app, perfect for marking Iftar.
Results: Our ‘Iftar incoming’ campaign delivered over 33m impacts across 194 sites throughout the month of Ramadan. In areas where OOH was targeted, bookings of scheduled deliveries were 21.2% higher than the average for the two weeks before the campaign launch at the start of Ramadan.
Client Quote: “Our Ramadan campaign not only celebrated the amazing dishes that are at the heart of Iftar dinners but also leveraged timely media with city specific Iftar times to remind our Muslim customers when to schedule their deliveries to enjoy delicious Iftar meals with their friends and families.” Maya Gallego Spiers, Head of Marketing, UKI