DoorDash Reframes Its Pitch, With Artful Storytelling That Puts Parents in the Picture

Real drop-off photos open doors

Say cheese! (Or whatever you ordered).

Real DoorDash delivery photos drive fresh commercials breaking this week from the delivery service. Seeking to position itself as an essential resource for harried parents, the brand’s in-house team worked with Imperial Woodpecker director Sam Brown on a series of visually intriguing spots.

Each vignette opens on a drop-off photo. The camera then glides through the door to tell the story behind that delivery.

“We were inspired by pictures parents upload to social media,” Alejandro Juli, group creative lead at DoorDash, tells Muse. “These are usually chaotic. And we started asking ourselves what might be going on behind those doors, and how a DoorDash order would have brought order to that chaos.”

First, baby comes down with a heavy cold, then dad gets sick and acts like a infant:

“The photos that inspired us stood out—to us and to social media at large—because of how relatable and chaotic they are,” says Juli. “You can genuinely see parents struggling to hold it together. We took some liberties in casting to make sure we weren’t exposing anyone real.”

To achieve a distinctive look and feel, the team employed a camera technique called the parallax effect. Various elements were painted black, creating a sense of gliding through walls.

“Everything was shot handheld, with actors holding perfectly still,” Juli recalls. “In some cases, we cast sets of twins and built playful doors into the sets to avoid cuts as much as possible.”

Here, diapers arrives in the nick of time:

“Every house was a custom built set, designed for the stories,” Juli says. “We tried avoiding VFX and cuts as much as possible.”

“The spot called ‘Revenge Baking’ probably was the hardest one to make, since it features kids and has no cuts.”

Finally, a postpartum tale that pulls no punches:

Brown actually built dioramas of each scene—aka the “papermatic” approach—to ensure fluid camera movements once filming began.

This revealing BTS reel puts the finely detailed craft in perspective:

This marks another creative highlight for the delivery category. Both DoorDash and Instacart recently earned Muse’s Ad of the Week honors. DD scored for its cringe-inducing IRL stunts, while IC tallied by spoofing male shopper memes.

Related: DoorDash Delivers, With (and Without) All the Drama