Today, Uber Eats services are available to more than 70% of the French population, making the target audience very large: all French people living in big, medium and small cities.

Despite its success, French people are still ashamed of using delivery services, but at the same time struggle to handle everything they have to do in their daily lives.

Uber Eats can help because now you can have almost anything delivered: food and non-food groceries. The brand had used notifications on smartphones to promote these new offers a few times. But not enough French people knew.

Our challenge was to break the established perception of Uber Eats as a takeaway service.

This wouldn’t be easy. In France, as in many other markets, key mass awareness channels, such as TV, were becoming a challenging environment for brand messages. Worse than that, consumers were messaging friends and family during the ad break.

We decided to hack an entire ad-break at a key moment: Sunday’s evening film on TF1.

We reached out to brands’ that are popular among French people (Burger King, Oasis, Free) to join the ad-break, so we could hack them in our unique brand tone of voice.

We demonstrated that people now have the ability to get anything on Uber Eats through a series of on-screen notifications, celebrating the range of products that we could bring to people’s door.

The sound of notifications caught people who weren’t directly in front of the screen.

And we made it all about Uber Eats, even when it wasn’t.

We built the social acceptability of using delivery services in a funny way. We let them know that we know that sometimes, they have to use Uber Eats, even if they are ashamed of it. As the campaign says…‘ça arrive’ (‘it happens’).

Our message aired during prime time in the ad break just before the Marvel movie on Sunday 18th September, 2022.

We made Uber Eats notifications, with their inimitable ping, appear on screen during a series of ads for brands ranging from Oasis, Carte Noire, Burger King as well as Extrême, internet service provider Free and men’s clothing brand Celio.

All were available on the Uber Eats platform and available for instant order – except of course Celio, which we joked about in the creative.

We negotiated bespoke costs for the ad spots – paying just a 20% co-branding fee and almost no money to produce – and worked with the various media agencies involved to provide guidelines to buy the right spot in the right ad break.

Our innovative and powerful execution created mass conversation and was amplified via OOH, online video and social media paid executions.

• 3.2m people saw our ad-jacking, significantly more than the average ad break in this slot

• Uber Eats trended at No. 1 on Twitter France just four minutes after the break

• Downloads peaked during the ad and then doubled in the following 24hrs, leading to a 200% increase in app downloads versus a regular day.

• Sales jumped by 2.6%

• Traffic rose 27%

• Google searches shot up 400%.

• Overall, top-of-mind awareness (62%, +7pp YoY), unaided brand awareness (79%, +5pp YoY) and preference (69%, +4pp YoY) reached an all-time high level.

• Awareness of new verticals among the general population is up 12 points year-on-year to 36%

• Usage is up seven points year-on-year.

Positive sentiment towards Uber Eats was up 17%, demonstrating that our single ad break changed the game for the brand.