Most Creative Marketers: Emily Somers

There’s no getting away from Friday night takeaway stories for Emily Somers, the UKI marketing director at Deliveroo.

I remember the time I met Emily with a group of other senior marketers, and at least two of them felt compelled to share detailed tales of their Deliveroo deliveries with her. It’s perhaps the nature of a business like Deliveroo - a delivery app that is not just a technological convenience, but is seen to be transforming the dining culture. For Emily that kind of reaction to the brand is because “it thinks food first, and not technology first.”

In its attempt to move away from a functional interpretation of its brand and bring more emotion, Deliveroo has been pouring money into telly - making it one of the top brands that has helped the TV industry roar back into growth.

In 2020, it appointed Pablo to handle its UK and global advertising business. The agency has since introduced a new brand line, “Food. We get it”, to focus on the taste and quality of food over Deliveroo’s delivery services.

According to its most recent results, Deliveroo increased global marketing spend by 85 per cent over 2021, from £224 million in 2020 to £570 million. The food delivery brand increased its gross profit by 43 per cent to £497 million over its last full fiscal year. However, adjusted EBITDA fell to a loss of £131 million, considerably higher than the £11 million loss the business reported in 2020. The higher aggregate profit was offset by increased marketing spend to drive brand awareness and boost new customer acquisition, along with further investment in technology.

“You have to remember, that Deliveroo had an idea and built a platform around that idea. But they did have an idea first, and the idea was all centred around food. You could put the brand in the technology category, but what does Deliveroo want to be famous for? We want to be the definitive food company,” explains Emily.

Food has been the one constant in Emily's recent career trajectory. McDonald’s. Dominos. And now Deliveroo. Her previous jobs included managing director at Havas Worldwide London and Leo Burnett London’s client service director and head of account management, which included running the McDonald’s account, before jumping client-side to spend three years at McDonald’s as vice-president of marketing and food development, scooping a record haul of creative and effectiveness awards. A stint as the UK chief marketing officer of pizza giant Domino’s followed, where she successfully launched a cross-platform campaign that delivered record Christmas period sales. Emily joined Deliveroo last summer.

She insists her current role is the most exciting ever. “Hospitality and food is something I’ve done quite a lot of. But this is different - a tech business with food at the centre of it is just brilliant. It’s just so crazy, but great. Experiencing the speed of change and the art of the possible is unlike anything that I've ever experienced.”

Not even in adland? “Advertising agencies are dictated by their client base and the speed of change that then they [the clients] are willing to move at. That training is quite good for this kind of business. But the business of advertising itself is not moving at pace. And the world of advertising has taken a long time to make any fundamental changes [to its own business models]. I’ve never worked anywhere where there is such a sort of open minded spirit for what's new, or what could grow the business to try to fail, if that's so happens. It’s just extraordinary.”

But as a former advertising executive, the one thing that Emily recognises is the talent and the pedigree that comes with working in agencies. An experience that teaches brand-building, commercial capability and accountability in today’s complex world. What unites the best marketers, she says, is “their ability to think fast, and not being too uncomfortable with ambiguity and change. Most traditional marketers are not of that mould. But look at [ad] agencies and you will find that kind of talent.”

Talking of change and agility, what do the future brand plans hold for Deliveroo at a time where there’s cut-throat competition not just from food delivery rivals but also instant grocery delivery apps? She reminds me that Deliveroo is not even a decade old. February this year marked the ninth anniversary of Deliveroo - a brand that entered our lives at a time when the food delivery market was exploding. And it quickly challenged our traditional perceptions of takeaways- largely a Friday night treat, deliciously naughty and delightfully comforting. Instead Deliveroo could deliver fresh food directly from restaurants to people’s doors. It now claims to offer the most food merchants in the UK of all the food delivery platforms.

“Deliveroo is still pretty young. And the marketing around the brand has only ramped up in the last three-to-four years. In London, it is the ubiquitous brand but the moment you go out into the suburbs, it is less prevalent, but then we have grown across the whole of the UK a lot in the last few years. So that has meant that there hasn't been a proper brand codification of who we are or what we stand for, until Pablo came on board.”

Pablo’s first major work for Deliveroo was the tagline, ‘Food. We get it’ - hailed as essentially a love letter to the flavour powerhouse, that is garlic. Last summer, the agency launched a much-talked about campaign celebrating the food-delivery company's official sponsorship of the England teams. The "Til We Dine" work heroes a progressive truth about English identity - that the core of modern English identity is our vibrant multicultural society.

"We're really trying to speak to our customers in new and more compelling ways. It's quite interesting working in such an innovation-led business, but ultimately, what we're trying to do from a marketing perspective, is drive a deep relationship and ensure that people understand the role that we play in their lives. The risk of commoditisation is extreme in this sector, and to to drive customer reach and loyalty our creativity needs to be stronger."

Emily cannot stop saying "ambitious" every time she says Deliveroo. Putting its disappointing initial public offering [IPO] aside, the business added 19,000 new restaurants to its platform in the UK and Ireland last year, an increase of 55 per cent. It also grew its grocery offering with almost 6,000 sites on the app, an increase of two-thirds on 2020. And it's easy to understand her excitement about the aspirations of a business, where its co-founder Will Shu was reported to be continuing doing the occasional delivery orders until a few weeks before preparations began for Deliveroo’s IPO.

“As a brand we're in the service of great food - and we're now in a place where we have got a brand platform, a strong tone of voice and some strong branding within it. But when it comes to how well we're connecting with our customers, I think there's a step further that we need to go.”

For Emily, the brand is working at understanding the relationship of its customers with food, with Deliveroo, and how that impacts their customers’ lives. “So the role that we play in all of this - the next iteration of our work [brand and advertising] is going to tackle that. Watch this space."

Emily Somers' Creative Hero

The English poet Wendy Cope, who famously compared “Bloody Men” to buses, complaining how as soon as one appeared, two or three others followed - You look at them flashing their indicators/ Offering you a ride / You’re trying to read the destinations / You haven’t much time to decide.

"She's one the most accessible poets, but also quirky but deeply moving and very funny and poignant. And also her poetry is very bite-sized, which I quite like. Wendy Cope - I love her. And her poems spoke to me when I was single, around the slight irritation of being single and everyone around isn't."

What's feeding Emily Somers' Imagination?

"My fiancé is an artist and his latest muse is woods - a very broad subject. But as such, we've been doing a lot of walks in woods in London and in the countryside. And always at that sort of dappled light through the leaves of trees, and looking at it through his critical lens has given me some creative inspiration The beauty of nature, it's joyous."

What Frustrates Emily Somers As A Marketer?

"The relentlessness, yes. But is that frustrating? I think that's just exhausting. I guess the frustration tends to come from people who write off the concept of marketing or any kind of long-term brand marketing, and believe that nothing other than things that are highly data-driven and immediately measurable are worth investing in. That I find frustrating. And the need to have irrefutable proof of everything that you do, versus looking at brilliant examples of others, within different sectors doing an amazing job and using that as a test case. That's what I find frustrating."