Just Eat builds on The X Factor sponsorship with biggest ever brand campaign

The online food delivery brand wants to “reassert its position in the market” as it looks to build brand awareness long after its sponsorship of The X Factor finishes.

Just Eat is launching a new campaign to keep awareness up after its sponsorship of The X Factor ends, and plans to take a closer look at its digital marketing efforts in the new year.

‘The Magical World of Just Eat’ campaign takes viewers behind the scenes of its restaurants using a flying delivery scooter. Stop motion animation transforms a Just Eat restaurant into a magical realm where chefs control utensils without touching them and chopsticks fly into delivery bags. The ad is accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek musical number, written and produced by creative agency Karmarama.

It is Just Eat’s largest ever multichannel marketing campaign, spanning TV, radio, digital, out-of-home, PR, social media and restaurant partner marketing. The campaign launches with a 60-second TV advert on Saturday (28 October) during the first live show of The X Factor.

Just Eat is currently eight weeks into its multi-year sponsorship of The X Factor, thought to be worth in the region of £30m. The campaign is the latest big marketing investment by the company. However, with the show only airing for three months of the year, Just Eat is keen to find ways to “build on what The X Factor has started”.

The campaign looks tackle a challenge for Just Eat around the fact that half the UK population would still rather use a telephone than an app or website to order food, which Just Eat says comes down “to a lack of understanding”.

“The campaign is about reasserting our position in the market, but we will always try and convert more customers from telephone to our platform. This is really about creating advertising that entertains people by putting our restaurants front and centre,” Ben Carter, UK marketing director at Just Eat, tells Marketing Week.

When the sponsorship was announced, Just Eat told Marketing Week it hoped it would move more consumers along the purchase funnel from awareness to consideration. Carter says while it’s too early to see immediate results, initial signs have been positive with brand awareness increasing.

“The X Factor is eight weeks in, and it is still the biggest property on commercial TV. It is getting the biggest share of 16- to 34-years-olds in terms of viewing figures, which we’re very happy with. So far [the sponsorship] has built awareness of Just Eat, and it’s getting people talking,” he says.

Just Eat will continue to ramp up its marketing into the new year, and increase the amount of local marketing by using targeted outdoor advertising and experiential activity. It will also look to “make its digital work harder”, by analysing the performance of individual channels more closely, and investing accordingly.

He concludes: “Social is a channel where we will continue to invest more as we see a big opportunity there. We are also becoming more sophisticated in how we’re using retargeting platforms and our CRM processes. Across every channel there is room and opportunity to make it work harder.”

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