The conventions of the period romance — the heaving bosoms, the forbidden glances, the rain-soaked railway farewells — have proven remarkably durable in the streaming age, which may explain why a food delivery service has decided to borrow them.
DoorDash, through its Canadian operations, has introduced a campaign that applies the visual grammar of Regency-era melodrama to the rather less fraught question of whether to order dinner. The spots, created by Wieden+Kennedy Toronto, dramatize what the agency calls "that moment where you're deciding whether or not to order in" — a moment that, in the campaign's telling, apparently rivals anything in the Brontë canon for emotional intensity.
"You go back and forth even though you know that in the end, you're definitely ordering," said Caroline Friesen, the executive creative director at the agency. The goal, she added, was to "melodramatize" the decision, demonstrating that DashPass — the company's subscription service, which offers zero-dollar delivery fees — removes whatever internal struggle remained.
(One suspects the struggle was not, in most cases, particularly Heathcliffian to begin with.)
A second spot, promoting the availability of DashPass through Amazon Prime, stages a tearful train-station goodbye. Ms. Friesen noted that filming at a rural Portuguese station was complicated by an "epic daytime party" at a nearby restaurant, which grew too rowdy for usable sound. The production was obliged to pause multiple times.
The choice of period settings, Ms. Friesen said, came down to maximizing the contrast between high drama and the mundane act of tapping a phone screen. "We wanted to make sure there was a lot of juxtaposition," she said.
DoorDash, which is based in San Francisco and went public in 2020, has increasingly leaned into humor in its advertising as the food-delivery category has matured and the competitors have begun to blur together. Whether Victorian aesthetics will move the needle remains, as always, a question for the data scientists rather than the creatives.