Doordash’s Super Bowl spot, in which the delivery service gave away a prize from every one of the 76 brands that advertised during the big game, has won the Titanium Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
The ad was created by Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, and was voiced by actor Laurence Fishburne, who read out the first 25-seconds of comically long website address, the rest of which scrolled quickly past the screen at the end of the spot.
The first viewer to copy and enter the website address (which repeated the word ‘dash’ many times) won a raft of prizes, such as a $50,000 down payment towards a home, and a $20,000 holiday.
Debbi Vandeven, global CCO of VML, presided over this year’s Titanium jury. At the awards press conference on 21 June, she reiterated the original purpose of the category, to reward work that ‘causes the industry to stop in its tracks and reconsider the way forward’.
She said that Doordash won the Grand Prix because it was so much more than a Super Bowl ad. Vandeven described the Doordash All The Ads campaign as a product demonstration that communicated the company’s move from delivering food to delivering anything people want.
‘One of the reasons we thought [the Doordash ad moved the industry forward] was that they were re-thinking everything,’ said Vandeven.
Doordash and its agency, Wieden+Kennedy, had to contend with legal letters from the NFL warning against the promotion, a complex web of partnerships, and last-minute changes to incorporate real-time ads that were broadcast during the Super Bowl.
When Contagious interviewed Alex Maleski, senior creative at Wieden+Kennedy, about the campaign, he told us: ‘That script didn't stay [the same] for more than 15 seconds, because it had to evolve consistently as we had more partners. Forget about writing it on paper, we were writing it while we were making the hero spot.’
