How to speak Just Eat

My biggest objective, joining Just Eat as their Global Lead Copywriter, was to give their tone of voice a tune-up. A brand with huge personality potential, and one with a right to be far more personal with its customers and restaurant partners than the competition.

However, beset by a huge lack of joined up storytelling, fragmented output from multiple agencies, an over-reliance on ‘get a pizza the action’ puns, and a far too laddy, UK-centric tone for a brand needing global consistency with tailored, local flair across it’s fifteen international markets — a lot needed to change.

So I set to work, involving a team of copywriters from across product, partner, and marketing, to thoroughly evolve the brand’s tone and personality, placing new emphasis on its market-leading confidence and a critical need for knowing your audience.

Here’s a snippet…

Putting it into practice

Staying on brand, my words have also delivered. Check out the campaigns and work below.

KFC x Just Eat co-branded OOH - spring 2020

Short, simple and bang on tone. This copy for our co-branded campaign for KFC delivered its message as fast as that tube train - highlighting Just Eat’s ability to deliver for every food occasion and bring you ‘The food you want, when you want it’. Job done.

Here’s A Bigger Deal - ‘Anti Black Friday’ 2019 campaign

We saw Black Friday last year as an opportunity to do something different. It’s one of those big commercial occasions that’s been forced into the cultural calendar, and the expectation for any brand is to offer a big gesture of added value. Yet, for today’s customers, and employees, value doesn’t have to mean discount – as shown by the ‘antidote’ actions and campaigns of a host of progressive, inspiring brands over the last few years.

Strategically too, there’s further debate to contend with: spend a fortune to compete with everyone else offering sales and vying for voice; or opt for a gutsier play, where a brand pushes a bolder agenda and uses the occasion to act on its values and something it cares about...

Which is why we decided to donate our ‘discount’ to our long-standing charity partner FoodCycle – a charity who serve up delicious three-course meals to vulnerable people across the country – and bring people together over a hot free meal. We decided to push for a bigger deal.

We completed the campaign with follow-up creative that said “You made it a bigger deal”, because our customers did. They raised over £250,000 for FoodCycle. I remain extremely proud of this one. It did something real.

BT Sport Premier League idents 2019-2020 season

Working with Stuart Eaton our Head of Brand and in collaboration with McCann London, our Global creative agency, we cracked into a brilliant opportunity to deliver our evolved sense of humour across a stash of BT Sport content featuring their most famous pundits.

This suite of idents ensured massive brand exposure across the opening weekend of the 2019-2020 Premier League season, and a fantastic chance to show how much we know our audience and the subtle nuances, banter, and opportunities for finding humour around their love of football — very much sharing a joke rather than telling one…

Check out my lines in the vids below. And these links here and here to The Drum coverage.

Doorbell Adventures — 2019 interest targeted YouTube campaign

The brief for this campaign was to tap into new, interest-targeted territory for Just Eat aiming to drive orders for a host of new demand spaces and occasions during the week. Focusing on three main hugely popular interest categories across our audience — music, video gaming, and football — we were tasked with providing engaging 6 and 20 second bumpers that would appear before and between relevant YouTube content.

The creative concept I suggested here was to add the Just Eat experience to the anticipation viewers felt as they looked forward to watching their videos, rather than interrupting them with a picture of a pizza and getting annoyingly in the way. True to our new tone of voice, these ads centred around showing we understood our audience and that we know and share in all the nuances, little details, and the culture people love around music, gaming and football. Having created and pitched the idea, I then worked closely with our in-house art director, lead designer, UK marketing team, and our external production team and director to script, storyboard, and bring these to life and deliver alt versions for Burger King and KFC. On a bit of a shoestring I might add too!

The campaign was hugely successful, achieving 1.9 million orders at a CPO of £0.12.

Check ’em out…