Can you remember a time before Just Eat and the other delivery services revolutionised the humble takeaway? We barely do. In the dark Before Times, you might’ve had a curry or a Chinese meal delivered, every once in a while. But now? The choice is yours, literally morning, noon and night. To quote an Oscar winner, food these days is a question of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
So, how does Just Eat stand out from the crowd? With its mischievous, fun-filled ads, and, of course, its sonic sign off – the tune you find yourself humming at odd moments of the day (probably accompanied by a stomach rumble), which may even have taken over from the McDonald’s whistle. We take a look at the best and brightest of the Just Eat adverts, including Katy Perry, mini fist-pumps and, of course, Snoop Dogg.
Katy Perry Just Eat Ad
Who is the new face of Just Eat? Yes, it’s Katy Perry’s world now, and we just live in it. Pop’s Queen of Quirk and Kitsch became the face of the Just Eat ads in summer 2022. The ad is a brilliant insight into what we’re all definitely assuming is Katy’s actual home, complete with dancing ice cream cones and a Katy puppet helping her to play the piano in her attic.
The genius of it lies in building an entire song out of the ‘Did Somebody Say Just Eat’ catchphrase. And not only that, but you find yourself singing along to it – whilst the brand reveals that you can order everything from a ‘mocha whip triple shot’ to a margarita with extra cheese, Subway and spicy chicken as Katy merrily rollerskates through her hallway with her curlers in, having ordered a ‘curry in a hurry’, eats sushi with her glamorous Afghan hounds whilst watching a movie in her own cinema room, has a Sub in the tub and wears a massive puffa coat in her empty fridge. Because why would you grocery shop when you can Just Eat?
You’ll be humming, ‘Ding Dong, ding-da-da-ding dong’ for the rest of the day. It’s a work of Day-Glo genius all round, which was created by McCann London with the perfect pop song written by Perry herself, Kris Pooley, McCann London and the team responsible for the original track with Snoop Dogg. Plus, the ad was directed by iconic music video veteran Dave Meyers – who was responsible for ‘Swish Swish’ and ‘Firework’, so knows Katy and her aesthetic well.
As for what makes Katy the perfect face for Just Eat, as she herself said, ‘Coincidentally, most of my records and eras have had food undertones to them, from strawberries to peppermints to now mushrooms. Ordering takeaway is a regular Saturday night for me, so it was fun to channel that into a video that is a combination of the things that bring joy to my life: poppy bright colours, wild outfits, and food puns sung over a catchy tune.’ Couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
The Just Eat advert 2022 took the company’s marketing into a whole new league – it’s now a global creative brand platform, running across 18 markets in 20 languages. It’s a far cry from its UK launch in March 2006, when it had sales of just £36 for the month – only two years later they’d passed the five million order milestone.
Did Somebody Say Just Eat?
Even the brand themselves didn’t know how huge the ‘Did Somebody Say’ catchphrase and campaign was going to be. Susan O’Brien, VP Global Brand revealed to Creative Salon that, ‘we couldn’t have predicted the success of Did Somebody Say featuring Snoop Dogg. It just put the brand firmly on the cultural map, anchored the message that Just Eat is the answer to all food cravings, and connected us with audiences, building brand love and consideration in a fiercely competitive sector.’
Yep, it’s arguable that The Doggfather really set Just Eat onto the path of delivery domination. The collaboration between Just Eat, McCann London, Byte, Craft and UM got an incredible reaction – especially as it launched in the middle of a global pandemic in 2020.
Riff Raff Films director Francois Rousselet teamed up with rapper and pop culture icon Snoop Dogg to create a ‘Snoopified’ sequel to an earlier spot which featured the ‘Did Somebody Say Just Eat?’ earworm.
Spoofing opulent rap videos, Snoop spits bars about sushi whilst reclining on a luxurious clam shell sofa, travels around on private jet Eat Force One and creates his own version of the classic music show Soul Train (Soul Food). Did you love Snoop more reclining in a giant bubble bath while still dressed in his tracksuit, or sitting on top of a gigantic stack of waffles with chocolate sauce dripping down them? It’s cool, it’s colourful, but above all, it’s just damn funny.
As the ad’s copywriter Phil Dudman pointed out, it was a time when we all needed some joyful silliness and, in terms of the evolution of a brand message, ‘this is a brand that wouldn’t have considered sending itself up a couple of years ago. Let alone ripping the piss out of its own campaign. We’ve finally gone from trying too hard to tell a joke to genuinely sharing one. Perfectly fronted by an artist wo has always shown his funny side and likes his food as much as his herbs.’ As he said, the campaign delivered ‘a brand personality our competitors can’t match. And it’s gone from delivering food, to delivering a feeling.’
Not to mention it was a huge hit on social media and in the press – and the best bit? Snoop himself obviously loves it. During an O2 gig in March 2023, in amongst ‘Drop it Like it’s Hot’ and ‘Who Am I (What’s my Name)’, the rap icon just happened to show the ad. Journalist Nick Reilly on Twitter said, ‘Dying at Snoop playing the entire Just Eat advert during his O2 show. He introduced it by saying he had the munchies and really needed some food.’ There are brand ambassadors, and then there’s Snoop Dogg.
Doggy Dogg Christmas
Christmas ads don’t all need to be John Lewis-style heart-tuggers. When you’re Just Eat, with Snoop giving you a whole lot of brand recognition, it’s time to have some fun.
Christmas 2020 was transformed into a Doggy Dogg festive event – the opening shots of the ad show a pair of Snoop Dogg-embroidered slippers and (presumably) Snoop whistling a couple of bars of ‘O Christmas Tree’, before putting a model dog on top of the pillars either side of a set of glitzy gates.
Kick back and relax as a blinged-up dog(g) sings a brilliant holiday-themed version of the Just Eat song (‘gettin’ sushi delivered by a reindeer’/ ‘Got my man Mr Claus on the line, let him know, that it’s Just Eat time’) in his massive mansion, surrounded by guests who are down for a good time.
Even the BTS is fun:
Love Island Idents – ‘Get Stuck In’
If ever there was a show which demands a takeaway, it’s surely Love Island. Which made the show and Just Eat perfect partners – aka ‘100% my type on paper’. The fun idents feature a plethora of UK comedy talent – including Roisin Conaty, Isy Suttie, Inel Tomlinson, Tez Ilyaz, Jamali Maddix and rapper Lady Leshurr – voicing geckos, a chameleon, lovebirds and a tortoise as they chat about dating and food, bringing in some of the show’s key catchphrases.
McCann London were behind this third outing for the brand pairing, with the animatronics designed, built and puppeteered by the award-winning John Nolan studio.
Everybodyyy (Yeeah) Chicken Satayyy (Yeeah)
Nostalgic for the 90s? Who isn’t? In 2016, Just Eat turned out a Chinese takeaway-themed hit with their ‘Manband’ ad. Four guys are lounging in their open-plan kitchen/sitting room before launching into a classic black-and-white-with-aviator-shades formation reworked rendition of Backstreet Boys’ ‘Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)’.
The best bit? It’s a toss-up between only one guy being under the cascading rainfall, and the delivery boy singing, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m back again’ with a Vocoder effect as the door opens at the end.
The Early Earworm
Before Just Eat got Snoopified, there was the first incarnation of the ‘Did Somebody Say…’ earworm in 2019 – which, it’s fair to say, divided opinion. The brand itself captioned the ad on YouTube: ‘Warning – you’ll be singing this for days’, clearly aware that they were onto a winner, whether it drove people mad or not.
The ad, the first for Just Eat by McCann London, features a young couple watching TV. The woman asks her partner if he wants to order a takeaway, at which point the characters on the TV – from a black and white film, to a gameshow, Wrestlemania contestants to Love Islanders, a massive Game of Thrones-style battle throng and Stewie from Family Guy – all start singing, ‘Did Somebody Say Just Eat?’ from the screen.
The Gospel-tinged tune was a hit: a brand legend was born.
Just Eat Promotions
‘We Got It’ was a Just Eat promotion that launched in January 2021, which celebrated the delivery service expanding into major brands. The ads ran alongside the ongoing ‘Did Somebody Say’ campaign.
With ‘We Got It’, McCann London focused in on the theme of highly personalised customer targeting, with the lead actress morphing into wildly different characters in her sitting room. All her furnishings and decorations are then rapidly rebranded with brand logos (KFC, McDonalds, Greggs) and she’s overlaid with a bunch of animal filters. They’ll deliver to your crib, palace or bunker (!) – further props to the set designers for their genius reinterpretation of the space each time. It’s an ad that packs in a lot, but the message never gets scrambled: you can now get all your favourite food brands delivered, wherever you want them.
Director Finn Keenan said, ‘the script is a brilliantly cheeky observation of those “personal” targeted commercials. A knowing nod that we’re all a bit over that “we know you better than we know yourself” approach. So, we took the idea of those over-friendly ads, and doubled down on how ridiculous they can be. I was delighted at how much I was allowed to push the idea and put our hero, the wonderful Daisy Badger, through an absolute onslaught of intense, in-your-face advertising.’
The soundtrack focuses on rapid sound effects to illustrate each visual transition, plus an ethereal choral as our customer is presented with all her fave foods from the brands. Then, of course, the ‘Did Somebody Say Just Eat’ sting to finish.
The new Just Eat ad 2023 showcases the fact that now you can get your groceries through Just Eat too:
The Matt Berry-esque voiceover has been updated (‘looks like you’re so busy – sitting, knitting… rage-quitting’ – very 2023), but the actress and her sitting room are the same as before, except now the latter is filling up with bags full of groceries. There’s going to come a point where none of us ever needs to leave the house again…
Balti Rocks
All the way back in 2015, Just Eat used a reworked version of Bonnie Tyler’s classic 80s power ballad, ‘Holding Out for a Hero’ to soundtrack a man who fancies a curry. ‘I need a balti. I’m holding out for a balti lamb tikka tonight. It’s got to be hot and it’s got to be fresh, and it’s got to have mushroom fried rice, mushroom fried rice’ sings our hero, as his suburban sitting room disintegrates around him and he’s transformed into a mullet-haired rocker on stage, surrounded by flames and yes, a giant balti dish.
Daft, but obviously memorable, this was part of the ‘Mini Fist Pump’ campaign.
His partner, meanwhile, preferred to go dance crazy with her Chicken Madras:
Did Groove Armada ever think that ‘I See You Baby’ was going to be repurposed to pimp out takeaway curry? Probably not, but that’s the joy of sync sometimes.
Hot Stuff
Want to know how your Just Eat delivery arrives so quickly? Probably down to the fact that their bikes don’t actually use the roads.
Nope, Just Eat takes to the air, with some Red Arrows-style formation flying, all set to Donna Summer’s disco classic, ‘Hot Stuff’, to demo just how many deliveries they’re doing on an average Wednesday night.
Just Eat’s Mini Fist Pump
The brand’s Mini Fist Pump ads were launched in September 2014. The campaign celebrated life’s small victories, capturing the feeling of ordering a takeaway, all the way through to the moment when you hear the knock on the door announcing the arrival of the delivery driver (or these days when you see the magic dot making its way up your street on the app map).
From getting a free bar of chocolate from the vending machine to having a hot guy sit next to you on a flight and your partner suggesting a takeaway whilst you’re waiting for a bus in the pouring rain, these are the mini fist pump moments.
Creative agency The Red Brick Road’s longer version featured more moments, this time to the jaunty soundtrack of ‘Wouldn’t it be Lovely’ from Oliver!
Top marks for the pregnant pandas in particular – though possibly that deserves more than a mini paw-pump, given how notoriously rare panda cubs are.
Victoria Bloom, UK head of brand, explained the idea behind the campaign: ‘The mini fist pump perfectly personifies the feeling you get when ordering a takeaway. It’s just like finding a fiver in an old pair of jeans or grabbing the last seat on a packed train. Our new campaign is about celebrating every last one of these little wins that brighten up our daily lives along the way. After all, the entire Just Eat takeaway experience is packed full of mini fist pump moments, from the first few taps of your order to the last bite.’
Magic is Real
‘Magic is Real’ also used a catchy song – although this one was more like one of those tracks from a Disney musical that transports you through a montage.
A guy running a Chinese takeaway dances his way through the kitchens, with food and kitchen knives flying around and working their magic. By the end, it’s an all-singing, all-dancing street scene, filled with takeaway owners and another flying delivery bike.
The First Just Eat Advert
One of the first Just Eat ads was a decade ago. ‘Don’t Cook, Just Eat’ used a Reservoir Dogs/Peaky Blinders-style gang of furious takeaway chefs rampaging through town armed with whisks, ladles, chopsticks and cheese graters, ‘angry because you is cooking all the time.’
Cooking is not something to just tinker about with at home, yourself! No, it must be left to the professionals. These guys.
It’s a fun ad, soundtracked by 60s-style heist music, heavy on Bond-esque brass to give it that Mob boss vibe.
Did Somebody Say…
You need music for advertising? Well, much like Just Eat, we have anything you fancy, no matter the genre or mood. We’ve got handy playlists; collections – with Snoop-style hip hop and tracks that are just made for sync. Oh – and the ideal music for food content, whether you’re ordering in, cooking or demo-ing.
Want more on the best brand ads? Check out The Edit, where you’ll find everything from Coca-Cola to McDonalds, and The Wonderful Everyday of Ikea for inspiration.
