From Concept to Kickoff: The Project Lifecycle Behind DoorDash’s Super Bowl Campaign
DoorDash's award-winning Super Bowl campaign exemplified effective project management, blending creative vision with strategic planning and collaborative execution. Learn how they did it.
Written by Autumn Granza and Deborah Walker • 23 September 2024
DoorDash has proven that the thrill of football season extends well beyond the field and into the world of advertising. Their Super Bowl sweepstakes campaign, a meticulously managed project that had fans vying for epic prizes, didn’t just capture attention—it earned the Cannes Lions Titanium Grand Prix, solidifying DoorDash and their agency partner Wieden & Kennedy Portland (W+K) as true MVPs.
We huddled with DoorDash’s Super Bowl Integrated Marketing Lead Catherine Fagan and Creative Studio Leads Eli Velez, Alissa Sheely, and Mollie Solon, PMP, to break down how they — along with a larger, integrated team — planned, executed, and delivered a campaign that resonated with millions, proving that every detail counts when you’re competing for attention in the biggest advertising event of the year.
Throughout the project lifecycle, how did you maintain the creative vision and foster collaboration among teams while meeting deadlines, budget constraints, and quality standards?
It all started with an ambitious but clear vision — in marketing, this is expressed in a brief — to show everyone in America that DoorDash is more than just restaurant delivery. “DoorDash-All-The-Ads” promised one winner would be delivered every item advertised during Super Bowl LVIII...if they could decipher a code in our commercial. Since day one we said as a team, “if we are promising to deliver the entire Super Bowl, then we really need to deliver the entire Super Bowl!”
With the strategic marketing brief in place to orient our robust cross-functional working group around goals, we assigned clear roles and responsibilities for each team member. Within the creative studio, Superette, there are three primary roles responsible for upholding the creative vision of a project: a business lead, a creative director, and a project manager. The business lead’s role is the lead integrator of the creative development process — ensuring each part of the project is done on brand, on brief, and on budget. The creative director is responsible for ensuring that the work stays on brand but raises the bar, and the creative vision is carried through to each element. The project manager stays on top of everything to ensure that the work is delivered on time and to spec. These key team members lead our relationship with our agency partner, W+K.
With the team in place, we moved on to defining and managing the scope. We kicked off with in-person working sessions at W+K to design the campaign ecosystem, which is an outline of how the big idea will be executed, activated, and integrated across all channels.
Then we developed an asset tracker which laid out all deliverables and identified the key messaging, design mandatories, specs, pass off, and live dates. It was approved by project stakeholders at the outset and from then on used as a source of truth document for all deliverables. The tracker was frequently revisited and updated as the project progressed and housed all completed assets and was used as a traffic management tool.
Finally, we needed to be empowered to make decisions quickly and confidently. When executing a campaign against a fixed date, it’s key to ensure clear lines of communication and the flexibility to make shifts at any moment while keeping the schedule baseline in mind. In order to make this agility possible, we worked in a “pod” which integrated the complementary skills of representatives from different parts of the organization, including integrated marketing, creative studio, public relations, social, influencer, partnerships, media, customer relationship management, product, engineering, legal, and more.
The most crucial factor in the project’s success were the daily connects with our Super Bowl Pod and our Chief Marketing Officer Kofi Amoo-Gottfried. We shared real-time updates, including unexpected events, new ideas, and changes to the plan. This allowed us to make important decisions promptly and prevented any obstacles from arising.
How did you approach risk management? What challenges did you encounter and how did you address them?
Yes, many challenges — from the start all the way up to the week before! Here are just a few:
Challenge 1: How do we get brands to approve and even participate with us?
We weren’t sure how engagement with other brands would go at first. But we began leveraging our network of contacts at brands like Mars, BMW, Popeye’s, Kia, and more — and there was not one “no.” Every brand was willing to participate, or at least willing to give us permission to use their brand in our program. The strong collaboration across teams was undeniably the most exciting part of this project.
Then there were approvals from the NFL and the broadcasting network CBS. W+K and their production and business department were instrumental in navigating all approvals, changes, and negotiations. We counted on a very experienced team to make it happen.
Challenge 2: If we say we’re going to deliver everything, we have to deliver everything. How do we predict what’s going to be advertised and how do we get those products?
We were one hundred percent committed to giving away something from every single ad in the Super Bowl — so we started with a healthy budget for prizing. We were scrappy in our approach to planning for the prize budget, which was largely grounded in predicting the types of ads we anticipated would show up. We manually analyzed ads from past years to forecast prizing, especially for big-ticket items, for example, the average number of car ads. From there, we kept a live tracker and monitored daily updates of brands as they announced they’d be advertising in the Super Bowl, to validate our assumptions or add to the prize pot in real time.
To determine the prizes themselves, we collaborated with several partners in advance of the game who were excited to contribute and curate the selection, so there were multiple plans pre-set. Many brands reached out after our “cart” was live and wanted to up the ante on the prize, which we loved. For example, Reese’s provided an entire pallet, Booking.com chose its gift of $20,000 towards a dream vacation, and e.l.f. Cosmetics chose to gift the winner a one-year subscription to their hottest drops and the entire Halo Glow Collection.
For anything that was a surprise or new during the game, we came up with the prize on the spot, inspired by iconic or arresting visuals from the spots themselves. This was done through close collaboration between the DoorDash and the W+K team while watching the game live in a “command center” at W+K Portland. Examples of on-the-spot prizes included Verizon—$600 towards 5G services and a red phone case, Twisters movie—a cowboy hat, and Apartments.com—$15,000 for rent.
Challenge 3: How can we guarantee that we will NOT crash the app?
With a concept designed to engage 100 million Super Bowl viewers at once, we had to find a solution that could handle the massive spike in traffic driven by the activation – without overwhelming the DoorDash platform. To address this risk, we decided that developing a microsite as the singular destination for DoorDash-All-The-Ads would deliver the best customer experience. Through the close collaboration of DoorDash marketing, product, and engineering teams, and agency partners W+K and Wildlife, we built the bespoke microsite to house our DoorDash-All-The-Ads prize cart and sweepstakes experience.
We also had to anticipate that even with paid media call to actions to visit the microsite, there was a strong chance that consumers would still naturally open the DoorDash app seeking out the sweepstakes. To guide those audiences to the right destination and ensure app traffic remained within manageable levels during game time, we had strategic in-app placements redirecting traffic from our app to the microsite experience.
We put the microsite through rigorous testing in the weeks leading to the big event to ensure we delivered a seamless experience for the consumers engaging with us on game day. While we weren't able to host the sweepstakes in-app, we wanted to ensure the microsite experience delivered the same quality standards our app is known for.
How has the campaign impacted DoorDash so far, and how do you think it will continue impacting the brand?
The real-time impact included over 11 billion earned press impressions, strong positive sentiment on social media, and over 8 million code submissions to our sweepstakes microsite.
The long-term impact is reflected through a shift in consumer perception of our brand, on a massive scale and on sports’ biggest stage. We proved DoorDash can deliver just about everything.
How did project management skills make this campaign possible?
Our project manager ensured that communication flowed across teams, that we stayed organized, and that we hit deadlines. Project management unlocks true collaboration across teams, agency partners, and with other brands that made it possible to produce an outcome greater than if we’d worked in a silo. That’s what DoorDash-All-the-Ads was about!
Looking back at this experience, we’re so grateful to work in a place that gave us the space and support to take a BIG creative risk, and that we had amazing people with the right skills to take an ambitious vision and make it happen!

Project Management Institute
Author | PMI
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