Cancelling tonight

Uber Eats and Special made the platform’s food business famous and ate rivals’ lunch with "Tonight, I’ll Be Eating". Then the global business decided its future was in diversified retail delivery - not just meals on wheels -  which meant the business had to change almost (almost) everything.

“That’s when we turned to Special Group to say ‘help us!’, per ANZ Brand Lead, Channa Goonasekara. “Because when you've got something as successful as ‘Tonight, I'll Be Eating' was for Uber Eats, it takes a lot to say let's sunset this.”

A bold, hard decision, agrees Special APAC Creative Director, James Sexton, and probably one that wouldn’t land well with most agencies asked to kill their original killer idea.

“To walk away from such success is a really hard thing to do – and as a big global brand, you're going to have a lot of eyes on you as to how you perform afterwards," says Sexton.

Indeed, and almost sacrilege for marketing effectiveness gurus when they preach the need for consistently hammering home the same message – good advertising doesn’t wear out and repetition and reminders power growth. But much as Uber Eats and Special tried to apply Tonight, I’ll Be Eating to broader grocery and retail delivery – locally and abroad – it just didn’t work.

“We pressure tested it,“ per Goonasekara. “The more we explored it, the more we realised we pushed it till it was broken.” Ultimately, “it was very much an ad construct. The minute we had to apply a business challenge to it, whether it be a retail message or a trying to reach out to a specific audience, it suddenly became a lot more difficult.”

Uber Eats needed a platform that could future-proof where its rapid delivery business intended to be in a decade’s time. Problem is, nobody actually knows where that will end up. “The truth is, you can’t really future-proof anything,” said Sexton, as Uber Eats could literally be delivering almost anything at that point.

But that’s the simple truth that became the new brand platform: ‘Get almost, almost anything’. But Goonasekara and Sexton say it wasn’t in the original running to be the next big thing.

“Get anything was not one of the strategic props that we originally worked on. We were looking at other territories with emotional benefits rather than functional … but landing on a functional benefit made sense… because it talked to our breadth of selection,” said Goonasekara.

But it did lift the self-deprecating tone – and star power – of its predecessor.

“It allowed the [functional] work to house a lot more of the emotion and be more expressive – because you're doing quite a job with this platform,” per Sexton.

“We knew that we were going to go through a process of having to change people's mindsets of what Uber Eats means, and would have to really drum that into the platform if we wanted to land it – and then to give ourselves a bed to explore and have more fun with it later on.”

For Goonasekara, “definitely one of the big selling points was the longevity of the platform, because that claim will never expire. We're never going to be able to deliver absolutely anything.”

The brief “created almost in collaboration,” according to Sexton, was for the whole of APAC to make sure it could scale.

The local team was also watching how the US tackled the challenge. Under marketing boss Georgie Jeffreys, it had launched a Super Bowl ad, ‘Uber Don’t Eats’, “where the brand was again very self deprecating in tone. ‘We made the mistake of calling ourselves Uber Eats, and now we deliver sponges and light bulbs – things you can't eat,’” said Goonasekara. “I used that as a blueprint when evaluating the work … It was a validating proof point for us that we can retain our tone and do something new, and do it in a way that delivers a really pointed message.”

Pub test

Australians “call bullshit, really, really quickly,” notes Sexton. While Uber Eats wanted to tell people that it can deliver a tonne of stuff in under 60 minutes, “some of the best creative happens when you poke a little bit of fun at it – just asking ‘what does that look like in pub speak’?

“That's where you end up starting off with ‘well, they can get almost anything’, then acknowledging the fact that you are taking the piss out of yourself, you throw another ‘almost’ in there for good measure.”

Plus, a bit of tension at the heart of platform provides plenty of scope to land a message, even when Uber Eats hasn’t got much new to say.

“As a creative, you're looking for some kind of rub to write about, because if everything's perfect, it's boring. When you get back from a holiday, no one wants to hear about a great time lying on the beach. Everybody wants to hear about the time you got mugged,” said Sexton.

“Giving ourselves that platform meant we could talk about all the good things –all the things we do deliver – but also about the bad things and the things that we don't deliver, our shortcomings. Even if we didn’t have new news, it meant that we always had something to talk to people about, regardless of what the business was actually doing.”

Either way, it’s worked, with the platform now scaled to circa 17 countries, “probably an even greater success” than Tonight, I’ll Be Eating by some margin, per Goonasekara, which exported to other markets, but not as many.

Goonasekara didn’t quantify the new platform’s business growth impact beyond top line figures – global delivery gross bookings were up 18 per cent year on year in Q4 2024, and that quarter was the seventh straight quarter of delivery monthly active platform consumers year on year growth.

“But what we can say, quite candidly, is we've seen supercharged adoption of our new verticals or new business streams. In that grocery and retail space, there's absolutely a direct correlation between the launch of this campaign and that supercharging.

“More importantly, what we're stoked about is the fact that our core business of online food delivery is actually at higher levels than it ever was during Tonight, I’ll Be Eating.”

Poo hits fan

‘Almost almost anything’ launched at the 2023 Australian Open, but only just.

 “I don't think it was meant to go out when it went out,” said Sexton. But Uber Eats wanted a big splash, had lined up Kendall Jenner and a cucumber gag, plus Abbie Chatfield, Shannon Noll and others and was itching to pull the trigger.

With the timings brought forward and agencies and production teams scrambling, Uber Eats threw a curve ball.

“Three weeks out from shoot we said, ‘actually, we want a tennis element as well’,” said Goonasekara. The upshot was quickly roping in Mark Philippoussis, and underlining that Uber could get almost anything, but not a new nickname for The Poo. (Proving the best creatives love a poo joke; Sexton said it’s “one of his favourite bits of that campaign”.)

“It certainly speaks to the agility of these guys,” said Goonasekara.

“There's pressure, but there's also a lot of fun that comes out of that pressure,” per Sexton. “When they first came to us [with that request], I’ve got no problems telling Channa and the team my thoughts. But …. [in the end] it was great.

“We worked together very quickly and we were lucky. We had an executional style that was a bit of a montage thing, which allowed us to fit somebody in, and as I say, it ends up making the work better. You end up with something that was a fun joke about poo.”

Sometimes everybody has to strain a little, suggests Goonasekara.

“Agencies – particularly the creative team at Special – under pressure, they make diamonds because it's often in those times when we're ultra crunched that we get the best work.”

“There was a lot pressure,” Sexton acknowledged. “But we made the right decisions, I think, in the end, to really work hard on landing the platform in its first year. That gave us the opportunity to then build on it and have a little bit more fun with the longer form storytelling.”

The latest iteration of featured Cher trying to turn back time to the eighties, and landing in the 1680s.

“There's absolutely nobody out of all this wide team that would have thought three years ago, when we were coming up with this, that we would then be burning Cher at the stake and calling her both young and old to her face,” said Sexton.

“We've always talked Channa and the team, and we all have really candid plans about where we want the platform to go, how it should evolve. But it's really great – we've actually got to see that come through and still been surprised about it.”

‘Commercial entertainment’

Poking fun at celebs helps drive the owned media Goonasekara seeks to amplify its paid spend on attention grabbing moments and sponsorships, such as the AO and AFL.

“We want people talking about our ads in the pub … When we see people talking about our ads in Brazil and Slovenia and Russia and Africa, you know you've kind of penetrated into culture.”

It’s entertainment, he said, “but we call it commercial entertainment, because ultimately this has to be driving business results.

“That consistency, the rigidity and the single mindedness that we've had for the past few years is paying off, because all we're seeing is a sharp trajectory of people starting to associate us with the brand that’s known for getting them anything within an hour. That's the mission that we set out on in mid-2022.”

Frank exchange of views

“I haven't worked with many clients like Uber Eats. They are very collaborative and very open. It's a bit more like an adult relationship,” per Sexton.

“Everybody trusts and values everybody's experience and expertise – and because of that, we have frank conversations that I think get us to better work.

Channa and I or some of the team will end up in a meeting room for five hours debating why we should or shouldn't do something one way or another,” he added.

And after one of those full and frank sessions, per Goonasekara, “we'll spend a week not talking to each other”.

“But it is always the work. It's not a personal conversation. It's always about making the work better,” Sexton underlined.

“It's just a communication thing – and I think our industry, considering what we do, can be rubbish sometimes at communicating. Sometimes you have to just spend the time to make sure that you're all on the same page, that your expectations are aligned, that you do you want to do the same kind of work.

“That's why this is quite rare, because you've got a quite a big group of people from high up in my business to high up in Channa’s business, and all the way down, everybody's got an aligned ambition to make great work that gets talked about, that is effective and drives a result for the business,” Sexton added.

“That is hard. It’s really not easy and we create a rod for our own back. Every time we do a successful campaign, how do we raise it from there, where do we go next?

So having candid conversations is the only way you are going to get good work.”

Non-linear > linear

Goonasekara is aligned.

“Special’s openness to collaboration is rare. The creative department at Special have open doors, and they're very willing to take something we say, and it's that tension that gets us to [where we are] because if we just pay the bills and let them do whatever they want. I don't think it would be as strong, [likewise] if they just followed whatever we said. It is that tension and the debates and the five-hour conversations that push the work to the space it needs to be.”

“If I think of the ‘Get almost almost anything’ process, almost every creative team at Special Group has touched it in some capacity, and yet they come in and add their own flavour to it – and we as custodians, help to guide and evaluate it and shape it, but it is a rare form of collaboration,” added Goonasekara.

“The big thing I would land is compared to a linear ad development process that I've experienced in other businesses, this is ambitious work. As I often say to my senior stakeholders, if it was easy, everyone would do it.”

Sexton said that is the key point.

“Being prepared to be non-linear is very, very important. I think most people want the process to go in a straight line. But being prepared to say, no, we’re going to take it over there, or backwards, or stop, this is wrong, we’ve messed with it too much – all of those moments are the things that get you to good work.

“Otherwise you end up in this linear [trap]. We're just human, we want to put things into boxes, we want to run in the most efficient way. But the truth is, creativity isn't always an efficient process.

"With Uber Eats … there's an appreciation that creativity isn't linear and there's an appreciation that you need to be flexible, to change your expectations at times and reset how you're evaluating creative work.”

Chose your favourite children

Mi3 asked Goonasekara and Sexton for their top campaigns from the current platform. Running out of time on the interview, they followed up by email

Channa Goonasekara

Picking my top four campaigns was hard but here we go - 

1. Kendal and Kris Jenner - “can I get something easier to cut” - as a huge reality TV fan and acknowledging the impact the Kar-Jenner’s have had on pop-culture, I loved that Kendall was willing to lean into her cucumber cutting misfortune and reclaim the narrative by having a laugh at herself. The team worked so hard to capture and deliver the self-deprecating humour Aussie’s love. It was brilliant to draw on their shared equity to help us launch our new platform and announce that Uber Eats can deliver all sorts of things now - just not a cucumber that’s easier to cut. 
2. Nicola Coughlan - Period Romance NO - Using Nicola’s star power from her feature role in period-era romance show, Bridgerton, and flipping it into the relatable desire of a real world romance with a regency era gentleman, felt like the perfect tension to showcase exactly why we only deliver almost almost anything. As soon as the creatives began to write the calamity that would ensue with a misogynistic and unhygienic suitor transported into the 21st century, the Uber team knew we’d struck gold. The brilliant line in the script where he arrogantly scoffs  “a woman - with a job!” was the line that sold me on this concept as it captured the tone we’d become synonymous for through our previous campaigns. I also love that we took a category like feminine products and bought it into ad-land in a way that it has never been seen before. 
3. Yes/No language and design system - the reductive and brutally simple language device of the words Yes and No, laddering up from our line Get Almost Almost Anything, showcases the breadth of selection available on Uber Eats (along with very similarly worded things that aren’t available). This concept carefully marries the craft of visual symmetry and copywriting to leave consumers to close the loop and guess the product connections making this one of my favourite pieces of work. This language system feels like it has potential to be a new distinctive asset that the Uber Eats team could use for years to come. 
4. Cher - Time Machine NO - the highest watermark of our longer format storytelling assets demonstrates precisely why you don’t actually want Uber Eats to deliver anything. I love that this story is endemic to Cher and her status as a living legend. It’s self-deprecating to see Cher go from past orders of “Anti Ageing Cream” to turning to Uber Eats for her ultimate desire (inspired by her classic hit, "If I Could Turn Back Time") to order a Time Machine. She finally found a way! The genius of this spot is how the creatives at Special took it from a “time travel goes wrong” story to one that is fitting for a feminist icon like Cher - by setting it in an era where women who were different were punished. One of the most rewarding moments of this campaign for the team was hearing directly from Cher that she fell in love with the creative deck we shared, making it impossible to say no to being involved, and that we had her wondering what was going on in Australia for the ad scripts to be so unique and funny. This was the perfect metaphor for the magic that the entire Uber and Special teams have been able to forge over years and years of partnership and close collaboration. 

James Sexton 

Not an easy thing to do, but here’s my top four favourite pieces - 

1. Time Machine NO

This one was such a long shot. It’s Cher after all.

Coming up with a celebrity, and a relevant YES/NO combination is often the easy part. The team working on this one (Hannah McCowatt & Laura Grimshaw), went through no less than 500 combinations (they were relentless). But the magic for this format comes in how it goes wrong, how you weave in the self-deprecation, and ultimately where the story ends. It didn’t all come at once for this campaign, but through constantly pushing and through really strong client backing and trust, I think we created something we can all be super proud of. It’s also the first ad I’ve made in nearly 20 years where my mum knew who the celebrity was.

2. Magic NO

Year One (Kris & Kendall Jenner) was about discipline, we had to establish the line and inject it with meaning. Then for year two, we got to stretch our legs and explore the consequences of delivering ‘anything’ to prove ‘almost almost’ is the perfect amount of anything. Tom Felton getting magic was a simple nod back to his childhood roles, but the twist of exploring the real life consequences of magic was what really made this feel stand out. We had no idea just how much Tom’s fans would get behind this and how far it’d travel around the world. 

3. Maybe Even Andy Murray

This campaign has opened the doors to another side of the Get Almost Almost Anything platform. Instead of talking about things we don’t get, we explored Uber Eats mission to get anything - even a retired tennis legend. By treating Andy Murray like a burrito, and making him available on the app for people to order, we cut through a very saturated time around the tennis. Throwing Andy (safely) out of a second story window was also a highlight.

4. NO/YES 

The No Yes product ads are yet another expression of the platform. It’s a repeatable execution, with seemingly infinite possibilities. They’re deceivingly simple, there’s a lot of craft in the visuals and the writing of every execution, and as a collective they are really hard-working. We’ve also used a few of these in timely places to generate earned-media, most recently at the Art Basel in Miami, letting everyone know YES we can get bananas and duct tape. It’s great telling longer stories, but nothing is more satisfying than a short story told well