How Deliveroo Is Making Now Even Better

A flamboyant, villainous character clasps his hands gleefully and lets out a cackle. Sat at a mirror with a towel on his head and a dressing robe around his body, he perfectly evokes the satisfying feeling of a takeaway ready to be wolfed down before a hedonistic night out.

Whether he’s dolled up, chopping veg and prepped to welcome guests, or indulging in a spur-of-the-moment iced coffee – the malevolent character is charmingly relatable. So, it's no wonder he plays a key role at the heart of Deliveroo’s most recent brand platform ‘Now Just Got Even Better’.

Set to Montell Jordan's 'This is How We Do It' – the work is a clear, differentiating statement for the delivery business. The original brief given to Pablo London was to highlight the array of new options available to users through the app and the joy it's partners' produce can spark.

"Our observation was that in the delivery space everyone was trying really hard to explain what delivery was. So you'd see a lot of riders going back and forth," explains Mark Sng, chief strategy officer at Deliveroo's agency-of-record Pablo.

"People understand what home delivery is – so we should be concentrating more on what makes us different. So we looked at what led to the birth of the business, which is the founder Will Shu's passion for food," he adds.

Running since September 2024, the platform coincides with impressive results for Deliveroo. The firm saw orders in the UK and Ireland increase by 5 per cent to £43.1 million in the last quarter of 2024. Meanwhile, gross sales are up by 7 per cent across its online platform.

According to results from System1's Test Your Ad Premium platform, the campaign helped the platform achieve an exceptional 96 per cent brand recognition.

The app-led food delivery service is in a fast-evolving sector, in which the competition continues to heat up– in 2015 the main players in the UK were Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats, but ten years on there is a much wider array of brands, including: Zapp, Getir, Gopuff and Weezy. Upcoming takeovers could also change the game – Just Eat has been bought by South African firm Prosus in a deal worth €4 billion, two months after the same firm acquired its German rival Delivery Hero. Consolidation of the two seems inevitable.

"This is a category where it's an arms race for salience with feel-good factor so fingers instinctively swipe your app first rather than the one right beside it," as Kantar's managing director Dom Boyd explains.

Figures from Kantar show Deliveroo at 23.5 per cent of the category's demand power share

Ogily UK's head of behavioural science adds : "The real magic in Deliveroo’s Now Just Got Even Better platform is that it harnesses the ‘now’. Humans have evolved over time to overly focus on the present, meaning we gravitate more towards anything promising an instant reward – even if we have to spend a tad more on delivery.”

He adds that while people can "subconciously" assume quality will be lacking if they haven't earned it, the "Now Just Got Even Better" "counteracts those misconceptions".

Meanwhile Sng highlights how the team overcame the challenge of selling in a category that is supposed to be seamless: “The only time you ever notice delivery and logistics is when they go wrong. What we wanted to do was focus on the thing people get passionate about, which is not the brown paper bag going backwards and forwards but what’s inside that brown paper bag".

The strategy also reflects the rapid delivery service’s shift towards grocery and non-food retail.

Deliveroo’s vice president of marketing Caroline Harris says that the platform “opens the door to a wide range of creativity” allowing for flexibility.

“We wanted a platform that puts the customer at the centre, moving away from a product-first approach to one that reflects how Deliveroo adds genuine value to people’s everyday lives,” she adds.

Evolution in a competitive space

As Deliveroo has expanded out to encompass more occasions, it has added more functions to its app. Users can interact with its “Give A Gift” functionality which includes a growing selection across flowers, brands like ‘Not On The High Street’ and ‘Accessorize’ alongside curated products from independent retailers.

It is the first time Deliveroo has featured Plus Loyalty (its subscription membership programme which allows unlimited free deliveries for customers who pay a fee) in an above-the-line campaign – and follows on from significant updates to the Plus Loyalty last year, as it moves towards its aim of becoming a 'Plus First' business by 2026.

Following the release of the TV ad, the aim is to raise further awareness across OOH and social, as well as TV – with a focus on moments.  “The strategy needed to be versatile, allowing us to feature a free range of messages tailored to our diverse and multifaceted customer base. It also had to work across all our markets, with the flexibility to adapt to different cities, regions or neighbourhoods, while maintaining its core message,” Harris explains

The platform also has to make an impact across 10 further markets outside of the UK from Europe to the Middle East, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Pablo’s deputy strategy officer, Lisa Stoney explains that in some markets, there are specific challenges – such as the strength of local players or adapting to different lifestyle approaches. Nevertheless, living in the moment is as intensely a human experience as it gets, making the platform universally relatable.

As Boyd explains: "The evidence shows it’s possible to win by simply being more brand-memorable. So even if you lack share of voice, you create effective share of voice (ESOV): stacking the odds in your favour by making people recall your brand rather than a competitor's, even if you’re outspent.

"It’s a creative magic trick that pays huge dividends."

This even plays out in how Deliveroo relates to its partner restaurants in B2B communications. “They have to work with partners, restaurants and they also have to talk to riders in its capacity as an app,” Sng highlights.

From the get-go, it was Pablo’s mission to create a platform that could resonate across audiences: “In the past a lot of the activity carried out by advertising agencies was predicated on this interrupted model where you interrupt what people are doing and then tell them a load of information you want them to hear,” outlines Sng.. “ You could do that relatively cheaply and reach the vast amount of people that way but now audiences are much more fragmented and they’re spending more time in on-demand spaces where they’re in charge. And if you interrupt people they get annoyed with you. In our view a proper brand platform is a blueprint for an organisation to create real value for customers so that they can earn the right to spend time with people in this space.”

This echoes the ambitions of Deliveroo's former chief marketing officer Adam Bishop, who told Creative Salon he saw 'Now Just Got Even Better' as "a north star against which we can innovate from a products and partnerships perspective".

Standing the test of time

While the cloaked villain is the first to hit the screen, the platform plays host to other key characters. Deliveroo’s latest spot features an Octoman merman-figurine with long hair attempting to seduce on a date – both the surfer-style character and his date indulge in the high life, tapping in to Deliveroo to order meals, groceries and flowers.

Stoney highlights that while the Octoman is a separate brand ad from Deliveroo Plus’s vampire-like mastermind character,  the ‘Now Just Got Even Better’ platform is the thread holding them together.

“We needed something that would stretch across both parts of the business and if we can get more people involved, they’ll use the brand platform more frequently. So we’re going into the next iteration of the brief and we envision that people might come back and there’ll be new characters,” Stoney explains.

She adds that the beauty of characters is that they can be placed into different scenarios and that “they can become literally anything at any time”.

She continues: “We think they’re really important, but we haven’t made any decisions as yet about which we’ll keep or progress.”

Kantar's Boyd is also hopeful: "You’d expect it to embrace the quirky fun factor in spades – and it does: ‘Now just got even better’ is an enjoyable campaignable idea that taps into an emotive universal category positive. Making good moments great. In this case, with a happily esoterically different date-night fantasy featuring a human octopus and swooning partner loving their food."

The strategic aim for Deliveroo is future-proofing. The sector’s numerous challenges include adapting to customer expectations of rapid speed ensuring innovation in a saturated space.

But as far as Harris is concerned, for Deliveroo, now really has gotten even better: “This customer-first, globally adaptable approach ensures our communications are authentic, impactful, and built to stand the test of time”.