He might have a wealth of data at his fingertips working for digital aggregator, but Uber’s Andy Morley knows the power of leading with creative first. “It’s better to get noticed, even if not with the optimal insight or plan, than have a great strategy with wallpaper creative,” he comments.  

Fuelling that commitment to raising the bar creatively is curiosity. “It's essential to becoming truly consumer centric, judging your work objectively and raising the bar continuously,” says the Uber and Uber Eats CMO.

Effective marketing strategy

Which leads us into one of the boldest creative and brand decisions Morley has had to make since he took up the ANZ marketing leadership reins in 2019, followed by APAC in 2023: Move on from the highly effective ‘Tonight I'll Be Eating’ platform – a golden goose of a platform – towards a new platform that would reposition Uber Eats for almost anything.

As Morley puts it, the challenge Uber Eats Australia faced was a paradox: Dominance in food delivery had become a ceiling to growth potential as the portfolio of products available through the Uber Eats apps stretched beyond traditional meal delivery and into groceries, alcohol and more. Cue the creative idea of Uber being the place to source almost anything that sparked a whole new brand platform.

“Our name was synonymous with takeout food, and while ‘Tonight I’ll Be Eating’ was a powerhouse marketing platform, our future growth depended on breaking out beyond food. The challenge? Repositioning the Uber Eats brand without losing the equity we’d spent almost a decade building,” says Morley.

To kick off the high-stakes shift, Morley guided the team through a 14-month strategic overhaul designed to evolve Uber Eats into a true on-demand convenience platform. The result was ‘Get Almost Almost Anything (GAAA)’ – a bold, global-first transformation built to retain the tone and distinctiveness of the highly iconic original campaign platform for Uber Eats, while reimagining the brand’s meaning in consumers’ minds long term and could better future proof the business. It also took that humorous approach by highlighting the shortcomings and what Uber wasn’t delivering, even as the portfolio of things it delivered swelled.

Helping drive decision making was a combination of deep consumer insights, ambitious creative reinvention, tightly defining the brand DNA and rigorous multi-market testing. “We crafted a platform that kept Uber Eats’ signature tone while reframing it for grocery, alcohol, and… almost almost anything,” says Morley.

Launched in carefully sequenced phases, the first objective was to build mass awareness of the new platform, then drive habitual changes through storytelling and full-funnel execution. Six GAAA chapters have since launched in Australia, again featuring a range of stars willing to poke some fun at themselves and their own reasons for cultural distinctiveness – Kris & Kendall Jenner, Tom Felton, Andy Murray and Cher – with each iteration further reinforcing Uber Eats’ broader role.

To date, the work has seen awareness of new product categories surge by +37 per cent in grocery and by +28 per cent in alcohol, and driven +234 per cent new customer trials in two years.

Despite the repositioning, the new platform also outperformed the final ‘Tonight I’ll Be Eating’ brand campaign iterations for food delivery, with salience up +3pts, incremental new user growth up +12 per cent and sales uplift increasing +7 per cent. The creative power of each GAAA chapter has delivered stronger attention, brand linkage, and commercial impact than the previous chapter, demonstrating the compounding benefits of a consistent platform to Morley and his team. And it’s become a global success since its first wins in Australia, with GAAA launching in nine markets globally including the US.

“By evolving the brand without losing what made us iconic, ‘Get Almost Almost Anything’ secured Uber Eats’ future- and set a new benchmark in brand evolution,” says Morley.

For Morley, a critical piece of the puzzle was the compounding benefits of long-term agency partnerships, which Uber has demonstrated through enduring collaborations with founding partners Special Group, Essence Mediacom, Hello, and Fifty Five Five.

Yet maintaining strong partnerships requires effort, especially for Uber Australia, where a lean marketing team of just nine manages an agency village of 70+ The cracks were beginning to show by 2023.

“Processes lacked clarity, communication gaps caused friction, and stretched teams risked burnout. We needed a reset to reinforce partnerships, supercharge collaboration, and deliver exceptional work at scale in a sustainable and joyful way,” comments Morley.

The solution was an Integrated Agency Team (IAT) Program, built on three pillars. The first is World-Class Processes. “Over six months of listening sessions and workshops, we co-designed a custom go-to-market framework with clear roles, responsibilities, and workflows. The program has been game-changing in creating alignment, accountability, and efficiency, enabling us to consistently build world-class work together,” says Morley.

Stronger partnerships was the second ingredient, and to help, Uber introduced quarterly feedback loops and surveys to pinpoint improvement areas.

“Open leadership forums and full team workshops turn insights into action, ensuring everyone is invested in growing the partnerships and aligned to our shared ambitions. Radical candor training across all our village improved communication, and an APAC agency partnerships lead was also appointed to ensure continued focus on elevating our effectiveness,” says Morley.

The third piece is what Morley labels ‘Unified culture’. “We fostered a shared vision through inspiration sessions, business updates, capability-building, and collaborative workspaces. We live by a principle of treating agency teams as internal employees, being highly inclusive for all activities,” he says.

Trust-building events such as the annual Cinco de Mayo celebration – born from a $1.4m campaign mishap – further encourage risk-taking and innovation.

All this has seen agency collaboration scores improve by 69 per cent, leading to a 12-point lift in agency view (81 per cent), and seen Uber’s view of collaboration go from 75 per cent to 79 per cent. Employee Engagement have also increased, with internal pulse scores up +7pts for team effectiveness. And the industry accolades have followed suit, with Uber and Special Group winning Best Agency-Client Partnership at the Effies.

“Our long-term partnerships drive faster execution, brand consistency, and a shared commitment to bold risk-taking work. By investing in processes, partnerships, and culture, we have elevated the effectiveness and happiness of our village to new heights,” says Morley.

Discerning decision making

A further example of the boldness of Morley’s approach as a CMO was shifting investment from buying eyeballs to earning attention. In fact, the marketing term he wishes the industry would stop using is frequency. “I long for a moment when we can evolve to attention,” he comments.

Every marketing leader knows consumer attention is at an all-time low, and traditional ad investments are delivering diminishing returns. “To address this, I threw out the old playbook and led a radical shift, moving significant investment from paid media to ‘earned’ campaigns to capitalise on modern consumer behaviour,” Morley explains.

The shift meant pivoting investment planning from traditional IMCs to PR, brand acts, creators and partnerships as primary drivers of salience and organic reach. “Against industry trends, we increased non-working budgets from 25 per cent to 35 per cent and prioritised unmissable cultural moments over traditional ad placements.”

The risks were high, but according to Morley, results have been even higher. For example, Uber doubled its brand act executions to drive earned media and virality with huge success, with an average media ROI of 3:1 vs traditional paid media. Highlights included Valtteri Bottas’ Uber Carshare (28M organic views, +32pt surge in Carshare awareness) and Uber Clothing Drive for Red Cross (826 PR hits, 31M organic social views, and 83,417kg of clothes collected).

A Creator Program, meanwhile, delivered +60 per cent greater brand lift efficiency than traditional media and led Uber to now triple investments in creators and influencers. Celebrity partnerships have been another stronger string in the bow. A 15 per cent increase in investment has unlocked 30 per cent more earned value, generating $10M+ in earned PR coverage.

“Whilst riskier, this shift proved that earning attention can be more powerful than paying for it in the current media landscape. We’ve now play booked this strategy to roll out across Uber markets globally,” adds Morley.

Business influence

It’s not surprising then, that transforming Uber’s planning approach from finance-led to consumer-first has been another one of Morley’s milestones over the last couple of years.

“For years, Uber APAC’s annual planning was finance-driven, with marketing playing a supporting role. Growth strategies looked great on spreadsheets but lacked real consumer insight, leading to gaps marketing had to scramble to fill. It was time for a reset – one that put consumer needs ahead of financial models,” he comments.

In 2024, Morley led the initiative to shift from marketing bolting into financial forecasts, to building strategic decisions from the ground up. The transformation saw him introduced a six-stage planning framework, integrating finance, product ops and strategy teams into a structured journey – from insight scoping to growth modelling.

“Every decision had to be tied to real-world impact,” he explains. “To fuel this, we launched APAC-wide Usage & Attitude studies, delivering the deepest consumer intelligence we’d ever had. Beyond numbers, we facilitated consumer deep-dives and experiential immersions, bringing leadership face-to-face with real users. The program culminated in 26 high-impact workshops, where insights turned into action, and growth models were rebuilt with the customer – not just financial projections – at the centre.”

As a consequence, Uber has eliminated 22 per cent of low-impact priorities. Leadership buy-in ensued. “Stakeholders validated the new process as clearer, more actionable, and aligned with consumer needs,” says Morley. “Our influence skyrocketed, leading to a +17 per cent marketing budget increase while other international budgets declined.”

APAC’s approach is now inspiring planning processes worldwide. “By flipping the script on planning, I didn’t just elevate marketing, I reshaped how Uber thinks about growth. Because real impact comes from strategies built around consumers, not just financial targets,” says Morley.

Commercial delivery

More broadly, Morley has been working to build a learning culture to raise the bar on marketing’s commercial value inside Uber.

“With growth becoming more challenging and external pressures increasing, it was critical we didn’t solely rely on past positive results. Instead, we needed to remain vigilant in objectively assessing our work to determine how we could raise the bar further,” he says. “To achieve this, I championed a program to rebuild our measurement framework and shape a culture that embraced learning as a path to continuous improvement—ensuring every marketing dollar delivered increased measurable impact.”

Two key components were implemented, the first a data-science backed measurement framework that assessed campaigns from multiple angles. For every large campaign, measurement included market-level holdouts, in-depth analysis of two brand trackers, brand-lift and conversion-lift studies for each digital platform, creative diagnostic testing, and platform best-practice creative score-carding.

Uber’s first Marketing Mix Model (MMM) followed, utilising 70 per cent of Australia as test and control markets for 12 months with significant variations in media buys, analysing the impact on both brand and business metrics.

However, data-science tools are only valuable if paired with a culture that embraces learning, failing and improving for Morley. “I cultivated a learning-focused culture by shifting post-campaign assessments to prioritise growth opportunities over successes,” he says.

“By openly sharing failures and learnings in all-hands meetings and quarterly reviews, and distributing post-campaign assessments widely across the business, we built trust, increased accountability, and inspired a relentless focus on improvement,” he says. “This combination of analytical rigour and cultural transformation ensured we continuously raised the bar on the effectiveness of our marketing investments.”

People leadership

Morley describes his CMO style as “Coach, Innovator, Culture-builder”. So when it comes to people leadership, he’s dead set on inspiring a culture where everyone can do career-defining work.

“Our culture has always been our secret sauce for creating world-class work in a fun and memorable way. However, in 2023, despite a history of success, our team culture showed signs of strain – burnout was rising, new members required upskilling, and overall cohesion needed improvement. While satisfaction remained strong at 78 per cent, the downward trend signaled a need for action,” he admits.

The realisation led to the launch of 10 workstreams and 40 initiatives to improve marketing culture and performance under four key priorities:

• Marketing Excellence – A Marketing Academy program featuring monthly training on insights, briefing, creative process, media execution, business skills, and leadership development.
• Making Work Easy – Workflows were overhauled and new training rolled out to reduce friction and get brilliant work to market faster.
• Driving Your Growth – A personalised growth plan, supported by managers with significant investments in career progression. Off the back of this 75 per cent of the team took on new roles or stretch assignments to build new capabilities.
• Culture & Connection – Recognition programs and shared experiences beyond social events, including cross-border ‘brain trusts’ to foster meaningful, purpose-driven connections.

“Each workstream was owned by leadership members, fostering shared ownership and deep engagement. The Marketing Academy proved so impactful that I scaled it globally, leading to over 30 training sessions across international markets. Today, I continue to lead this program globally,” says Morley.

Proudly, Morley reveals the Uber Marketing APAC team is the most engaged team at Uber globally, with satisfaction increasing from 78 per cent to 91 per cent. Work engagement lifted 14 points to 91 per cent, and there’s been Zero regrettable exits in two years.

“By focusing on talent, collaboration, and capability-building, we didn’t just protect our culture, we supercharged it,” concludes Morley. “In doing so, we created the conditions for the most impactful work of our careers.”