Instacart CMO Laura Jones on the brand’s first airport-focused campaign

After navigating consumer shifts during the height of the pandemic, Instacart Chief Marketing Officer Laura Jones is looking forward to sharpening the delivery brand’s marketing mix, as it seeks to maintain the momentum it gained at the peak of COVID. A year into her role, the former Uber executive has shepherded Instacart through its first integrated campaign, leaned heavily into TikTok to drive delivery for the Super Bowl and spoke to younger consumers through a campaign with Lizzo that featured the pop star's favorite items. Instacart’s latest campaign relies on out-of-home advertising, specifically in six airports across the country, in Los Angeles, Miami, Denver, Orlando, Philadelphia and Seattle. The goal is to reach travelers and families arriving and returning from summer vacations. The ads feature taglines such as “You didn’t fly this far to shop for groceries” and “You’ve lugged enough bags today” along with a QR code new customers can scan for $20 off each of their next two orders. The in-house created campaign will run until Aug. 11. “Uber did so much with airports,” Jones said. “And that made sense, that was the next step off the plane to get home or to your hotel.” She said the brand heard feedback from Instacart users who said the platform was a kind of travel “hack”—a way to order groceries to their Airbnb or on their way home to get to relaxing faster, or more efficiently prepare for a new week post-vacation. Indeed, Jones shared that while flying back from a shoot for the campaign, a woman next to her was teeing up an Instacart order. “We’re testing a mix of origin and destination airports to see which leg resonates more,” Jones said. “Both with geographic market stats and QR usage.” Ad Age Best Places to Work Recognizing employers in advertising and marketing Enter here It hasn’t all been a smooth ride. Instacart planned to go public in 2022, but big swings in consumer habits and a challenging economic environment led the company to slash its valuation in March 2022 by almost 40%. But going public this year doesn't seem to be totally off the table, as customers seem to have stuck with the app. Instacart generated $2.5 billion in revenue for 2022, up 39% from 2021, according to the Wall Street Journal. Ad Age recently caught up with Jones to learn how Instacart has expanded into different channels, why it’s sticking with a project-based agency approach (for now), and how the platform is already using AI. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. You came to Instacart in the middle of the pandemic, what was that like to start a new role for a company whose product was in high demand? I had been at Uber for six years before this, and at the end so much of that was shutting down rides and shifting to Uber Eats. The pandemic ended up having two chapters to me: the Uber pivot, and then finding the Instacart opportunity come across my desk. I was a huge user of Instacart myself at the time, and knew I had to take the call. I was excited to take the brand and modernize it in a way that would lay the foundation for our post-pandemic future, or at least what we thought would be post-pandemic growth—2021 turned out to be the middle! But now I think that future has arrived, and this year is about sustainable growth and how our product competes. How do we make it so that for people for whom we were the only choice, now that things have opened up, how do we stay engrained in those routines? How has that impacted your marketing mix? When I first got here, the vast majority of our spend was all inbound from Google search and Google shopping. And we were able to harvest some organic demand from the pandemic and the surge in interest in our category. But moving into 2022, I realized that our strategy wasn’t just demand capture, but needed more demand creation—2022 became about channel expansion and testing. We moved to more outbound channels like streaming platforms, audio, social media. Our Lizzo campaign was our foray into YouTube, our Super Bowl push was a reason to launch our TikTok and start upping our influencer usage. 2023 will be about finding our most efficient mix, a “year of brandformance” as we’re calling it. In my first year, we had cordoned off the brand media budget from our performance media budget. This year, the level of spend in performance media is shaping our brand, so we polled the budget and plan to lean more into linear TV and into audio. Why does Instacart use a project-based approach rather than an AOR? Because we are such a young organization in terms of doing full-funnel marketing, I wanted to be able to find our voice and identity and not rush into a relationship that we would be beholden to for years. Instead we’ve built an in-house creative studio to have some of that muscle and DNA internally, and then work with different agencies to see who understands our brand, who do we have chemistry with, who can meet our timelines. I think it’s too early to find a partner, but we are open to it. I don’t want to preclude it as something we would never do. How do you speak to a wide range of customers, Gen Z in particular? Shopping behaviors are so different when we look at a family of four versus a single Gen Zer. Last year we launched a convenience offering, so delivery in under an hour, or even 30 minutes depending on the market. That is something that younger customers gravitate toward. There’s less meal planning and more meeting those immediate needs. From a media standpoint, Gen Z consumption is particular. We launched our TikTok in February of 2022, and we’ve been working closely with the platform and their creator studio. We hear all the time about the need to market authentically and that Gen Z doesn’t want to be marketed to, so it’s been good for us to learn how to show up on the platform in a native way. @instacart Kimchi grilled cheese sandwich… the recipe we never knew we needed. Get your ingredients via Instacart now! #Ad #InstacartPartner #Recipe #Kimchi #GroceryDelivery #GrilledCheese ♬ original sound - Instacart With Gen Z, they can grow with our business. Maybe they come to us while they are single, then we help with planning date night dinners as couples, all the way up to being parents. And some millennials are parents now, and we find them on streaming and audio channels like podcasts. Read more: Gen Z marketing playbook How do you see AI impacting the platform? This was all we were talking about at Cannes. How AI will change our industry is something that every marketer is thinking about, myself included. For Instacart I think it will manifest in two ways. The first is already live, it’s our “Ask Instacart” feature. Instead of filling out a grocery list item by item, you can search for, say, a vegan meal plan for a family of four or gluten-free snacks for kids. So that will be interesting to see how customers use that. The second is how our marketing team will use it internally. How can we save money and time, and free up people to work on more impactful creative or campaigns instead of more mundane tasks that perhaps AI could do?

Instacart CMO Laura Jones on the brand’s first airport-focused campaign

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