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This is a self-funded case study using our Ad Testing solution.
At the height of the pandemic in 2020 we reviewed Just Eat’s first remix of its infamous ‘Did Somebody Say’ jingle — a period where food delivery services were growing at an eye-watering rate. Starring Snoop Dogg, the campaign successfully carved out a very distinctive positioning for Just Eat and set the foundations for a long-term campaign platform.
Almost two years later, ‘Did Somebody Say’ is back and fronted by a new celebrity (Katy Perry) together with a new genre (and cuisine!). With Katy taking the limelight and belting out an ode to açaí, we were interested to find out how the hotly anticipated follow-up to one of the shining lights of the pandemic would fare. To assess the visual and audio feast served up by two very different artists, we used our 3Cs framework.
‘California girl’ demanded viewers’ attention with all the vibrancy and liveliness people have come to expect from the pop icon. The upbeat music and food-inspired costumes were highlights, leaving people feeling happy and uplifted. While both campaigns proved highly distinctive, they each engaged people in very different ways (largely a function of their contrasting genres). Katy’s pop rendition, together with the bright and fun visuals, made the ad feel more like a music video, consequently achieving a warmer and more upbeat tone. In comparison, the very clever and catchy karaoke-style supers used for Snoop Dogg (e.g. "tacos to the chateau") made the rap remix easier to understand and more likeable.
The Katy Perry spot not only effectively leveraged Just Eat’s existing assets, but also built upon the foundation laid by Snoop Dogg’s 2020 spot. The ad again opened with the familiar ‘Did Somebody Say’ tagline, while the rest of the story played on the iconic jingle. The brand’s logo and colors (together with lots of food!) were integrated throughout. While the production was a seamless fit with expectations of Just Eat (a testament to just how successfully Snoop Dogg embedded the creative theme), there was some sense the ad was more ‘a music video for Katy Perry’ rather than ‘an ad for Just Eat’. This was a function of the harder to dissect lyrics, the lack of karaoke-style supers, and general music clip theme.
The signature music video styling and playful approach helped differentiate Just Eat, particularly amongst younger people who were the campaign’s core focus. Still, the Katy Perry spot forwent the karaoke-style supers which explicitly reinforced the varieties of food available and convenience of Just Eat’s delivery services. This meant the ad wasn’t as successful at positioning Just Eat as a leader, or that it offers a wide range of food options. In saying that, the slick production and carefully coordinated visuals did still convey ideas around speed and reliability.
One of the all-too-familiar missteps when featuring celebrities in advertising is making the story all about them — rather than the celebrity being the one driving it. In the short-term this leads to poor brand attribution. In the long-term it leads to an ugly divorce when both parties go their separate ways (resulting in the accumulation of any distinctive properties built over time being flushed down the toilet).
This is why the episodic approach taken by Just Eat (and also fierce rival Uber Eats) has much greater potential for longevity, with the creative idea enabling celebrities to be easily interchanged (and even localized to better manage onerous royalties).
Despite the two-year hiatus, a testament to the strength of the original Snoop Dogg creative was that it was so memorable people spontaneously recalled it (many to mention how much they adored it!). A strong, repeatable creative theme isn’t just beneficial because it translates into a distinctive branding property over time, but also because it instills a level of emotional resonance that all subsequent communications benefit from.
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