DoorDash is strengthening its media network through new ad products and the acquisition of tech company Symbiosys, aiming to help brands reach consumers both on and off its platform.

The acquisition brings several key developments to DoorDash's advertising offerings:

• Enhanced off-site capabilities to extend campaign reach beyond DoorDash
• AI-generated tools for better consumer segmentation
• Expanded ad formats including video, enhanced product displays, and search placements

“The holy grail of this whole thing is that we can prove to brands that more of their national and brand media spend can be utilized with a technology platform like this,” said Toby Espinoisa, vice president of DoorDash Ads.

Offering predictable spend

DoorDash's cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model has proven attractive to advertisers, particularly those operating on thin margins.

Some 20% of DoorDash users are now ordering from non-restaurant categories, said Espinosa, and this diversification has made DoorDash appealing to advertisers seeking new customers and to prove incrementality.

"Our CPA-based platform allows restaurants and retailers to grow without having to invest their own dollars upfront," Espinosa said. "This has led to an incredible amount of demand."

With this launch, the company’s new offerings now include campaigns with automated budgets, as well as off-site capabilities that extend a campaign’s reach beyond the DoorDash platform. The Symbiosys acquisition will also make for more collaboration beyond DoorDash itself and across retail media networks, said Espinosa.

“I didn’t (used to) spend that much time with the head of retail media network at Sephora, for example, but we’re all on the same mission of trying to help our brands grow, leveraging the fact that we have such a rich consumer data set,” he said.

Enabling cross-Network collaboration

A key innovation from DoorDash is collaborative bidding between retailers and brands. DoorDash might only want to bid two dollars to show a returning customer an alcohol ad, for example, while Molson Coors might be willing to bid eight dollars to reach a new consumer.

“The most powerful thing for all these brands is that these overarching digital systems continue to grow and thrive, and we can deliver the highest iROAS for our collective CPG partners across the wider web,” said Espinosa.

This collaborative bidding is particularly beneficial in convincing bigger advertisers and media companies to invest in retail media, he said.

"Meta benefits from us and brands bidding together on their ad products," Espinosa explained. "For the first time, you have this really interesting three or four way partnership model that allows us to see if the industry can finally move."

Evolving with consumer behavior

The Symbiosys acquisition will help DoorDash advertisers extend their campaign reach to search, social, and display with closed-loop measurement. DoorDash is also enhancing its own search ad products as user behavior shifts from browsing to searching.

• 88% of consumers use retail site search, per a July 2024 Disqo survey.

"The way in which people use our app has shifted," said Espinosa. "Whereas when we launched the business three years ago, everything was about building an Instagram-type ad experience. Today, the consumer is moving towards search."

Considering the measurement challenge

As DoorDash innovates and extends its offerings beyond a controlled internal environment where it can control for incremental ROAS, measurement is top of mind, he said.

• More effective and accurate campaign measurement is the most important (42%) issue in retail media advertising, per a March Kiddi survey.

“When you start getting further and further off site, you start getting into the wild west and the big world of talking with the juggernauts, where your measurement needs to stack up pound for pound against them,” he said. "We're still trying to figure this out. But I think if you look forward, it is maybe singularly the largest opportunity for retail media networks going forward.”

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