Menulog employs AI to localise its ‘What’s Good in Your Hood’ platform
Food delivery service, Menulog, has released a series of hyperlocalised advertisements to make its “What’s Good in Your Hood” platform relevant to a wide range of regions and suburbs across Australia.
The collective work was generated by a bespoke toolkit that combines AI models with live action filmmaking and traditional VFX capabilities. It was developed by advertising agency Thinkerbell, Made Promptly, and post-production studio Heckler.
The result is a campaign with the “What’s Good in Your Hood” creative work at its core, but a number of localised assets “showcasing local restaurants with lyrics and executions adapted to communities across the country”.
According to Thinkerbell, close to 500 restaurants appear in the work, with “more than 250 audio and 25 video assets” being delivered via ad-serving technology from Innovid.
The agency’s head thinker, Kiely Decker, expressed her pride at the work’s “strategic thinking” and how it “stretched from the big creative platform down to the smallest local detail, with localisation matching the media — hyperlocal for digital audio and out of home, broader for terrestrial TV”.
Bliss n Eso, the Australian hip hop act featured in the original platform, provided numerous verses to the project and helped train a voice model to replicate their energy, rhythm and tone. Their contributions allowed the campaign to create localised audio shout outs for any participating restaurant and targeted suburb.
“We have worked with several emerging technologies in the AI space to move beyond generic outputs into contextually relevant creative,” Thinkerbell’s executive creative tinker, Sesh Moodley, said in a release.
“For us that meant using AI not as a shortcut, but as a collaborator that could help us handcraft thousands of local stories.
“Every suburb, every restaurant, every shout-out feels unique because it was designed to. Importantly, this campaign was not led by machines. It was led by creativity. Mushroom Records and Bliss n Eso were the perfect partners to prove that when you fuse artistry and technology, you do not diminish creativity, you amplify it.”
Apart from making marketing materials that are localised to a “postcode-level”, the campaign was designed to strengthen Menulog’s strategy on supporting local restaurants and their people.
“As the OG on-demand delivery platform, we have been part of local communities for almost 20 years, working with small and independent restaurants across Australia,” Simon Cheung, marketing director (CMO) at Menulog, said in the same release.
“While we deeply care about championing restaurant partners, it’s always been a challenge to feature them at a larger scale. This campaign enables us to feature hundreds of hyperlocal ads that do not just celebrate our food heroes but actively dive odes and value back into their businesses.”
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Matthew is the editorial assistant at Mumbrella. He joined the company at the end of September 2023.
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