Just Eat Decides That Katy Perry Was Not, in Fact, Forever

The food delivery company Just Eat, having spent a considerable sum on celebrity-driven campaigns over the past several years, has concluded that there might be a better use for all that money.

The company is introducing a new advertising platform called "Stay Just Where You Are," which it hopes will become the kind of enduring brand idea that advertising people discuss enviously at conferences for the next two or three decades. The campaign, created by VCCP in London, replaces the pop star Katy Perry, who had been the face of the brand until recently and whose participation in promotional emails about McDonald's offers would apparently have been both prohibitively expensive and unlikely to receive her blessing.

Ralph Rijks, the chief marketing officer of Just Eat, laid out the strategic thinking at a press briefing with the patient precision of someone who has spent many months in conference rooms. "When you see the answer, it probably looks quite obvious," Mr. Rijks said. "But getting to a place like this is extremely hard work."

(One suspects that some of that hard work involved explaining to various stakeholders why paying a pop star several million dollars to appear in advertisements was perhaps not the optimal long-term approach.)

The business context, as Mr. Rijks described it, is that Just Eat was the original player in most of its European markets but has spent the past eight to ten years watching well-funded competitors make life difficult. The brand is strongly associated with the Friday night takeaway — the family curry, the pizza — but the growth is in weekday orders and new categories like morning coffee and drugstore items.

The new campaign focuses on what the company calls "moments that matter," the small domestic scenes that people would prefer not to interrupt by going out for groceries. The launch film features an elderly man feeding his grandchild a bottle while his daughter's dinner arrives via the app.

When asked whether he literally meant the platform should last twenty to thirty years, as stated in the brief, Mr. Rijks said yes — and preferably longer.

VCCP received word that it had won the account on Christmas Eve, which is one way to ensure that an agency's holiday party has a certain mood.

Original story published in The Drum: "Inside Just Eat’s plan to give people more moments that matter | The Drum"