Responses by Biz Anderson, strategist; Hayley Hinkley, creative; and Maddie Rosenberg, creative, Mother LA.

Background: “While the food delivery category continues to expand in markets and product offerings, the goal for delivery service Postmates became winning over specific eaters by delivering the food they crave,” says Biz Anderson. “With the Postmates team, we narrowed down to a handful of key markets, the buzzworthy restaurants in each and the creative-class foodies who love to order from them. The task then became unlocking the emotional reasons people crave these foods.”

Design thinking: “Food isn’t just flavor; it gives us distinct, visceral feelings,” says Maddie Rosenberg. “These are feelings we all intuitively know but don’t know how to describe. So, with this campaign, we sought to capture each food’s unique dopamine rush, pulling in all the sensory, emotional and metaphorical elements evoked the moment you bite in.”

Challenges: “Distilling each food’s distinct feeling,” says Hayley Hinkley. “It took a lot of collaboration and discussion to push past initial clichés and cultural associations, but this allowed us to define universal truths that would resonate with everyone.”

Favorite details: “That’s a tough question!” Hinkley admits. “So much work and craft went into each piece of this campaign, so it’s really difficult to choose. If I really had to pick, my favorite details are the heads and how they crack open to reveal our foods and the worlds associated with them. It was really fun to cast such interesting characters. It would have been easy to keep them as stills, but adding expressions gave an extra element of absurdity that made sense with the Postmates brand while also nodding to the feelings of each food and the worlds we are about to enter.

“Another one of my favorite details is our little dumpling character when it enters the brothy soup bubble,” she continues. “The little nose bubble it releases as it purrs, fully submerged, brings me a lot of joy. There are many small details like that throughout the campaign, both visual and audible: the childlike ‘zooms’ in the donut shops; the elegant, jewel-like sushi cubes; and the bouncy, jelly-like sheen of our boba balls. There are so many small details, and you find something new each time you watch them.”

New lessons: “As a brand focused on people’s irrational relationship with food, we talk a lot about food as an emotion, but it wasn’t until we conducted in-depth, synesthetic research around specific foods that we learned just how weird and magical the act of eating good food is itself,” says Anderson. “We all learned to tune into the experience when we eat, especially if it’s something really delicious.”

Visual influences: “We were inspired by synesthetic thinking, translating taste into visuals and sound—i.e., a fancy way to say we ate food and talked about it,” says Rosenberg. “This resulted in multisensory moodboards that combined unexpected references from across film, art, music and even fashion. Our goal was to capture each food’s feeling as entirely distinct rather than simply assigning it a genre. Then, we were lucky enough to partner with production company Nexus and music company Soundtree, as well as a talented roster of artists and composers whose unique styles evoked the feelings we were after.”

motherla.com
nexusstudios.com/nexus-design-studio
soundtreemusic.com