What you need to know:

• Uber Ads’ New York-based boss Michael Akkerman says Australia – one of the fastest growing markets outside of North America – will be the test bed for its latest moves.
• He was in town last week wooing agencies and talking up the platform’s “brand-formance” capability, i.e. connecting both brand investment and demand conversion via a play he describes as retail media meets “mobility media”.
• Ads on the Uber Rides app can be married with sales via the Uber Eats delivery service – with the delivery business expanding way beyond food and FMCG.
• Brands such as Coke and Absolute Vodka have seen up to 28 per cent sales increases from that combined brand-demand approach, and Akkerman suggests treating them separately is old hat. “More and more that funnel – that separation of the two – is being consolidated into one.”
• An ex-Pinterest global partnerships chief, Akkerman claims Uber ads deliver click through and engagement rates other platforms can’t get close to.
• Now it’s bidding for scale to rival those platforms – but he says “cheap eyeballs” is not what Uber is selling.
• Get the full download via the podcast.

Growth drivers

People had worked out that Uber was angling to become an ad business as far back as 2018 (but then, all tech platforms, and now seemingly every retailer, ultimately become ad businesses). Since then, Uber has branched far beyond takeaway in its Eats business, and way beyond rideshare in its mobility business.

“Pianos delivered in one hour” is the CEO’s mission, APAC marketing boss Andy Morley recently told Mi3, which makes it a cross-category retail media business with its own fulfilment and logistics.

New York-based boss Uber Ads boss Michael Akkerman calls it “meta” retail media meets “mobility media”, where (despite rival Lyft also doing ads) he claims Uber is operating in a category of one – and is linking brand to demand with ads in cabs driving immediate sales hits on the Eats platform. He’s calling it ‘brand-formance’, i.e. ‘double duty’, but within a closed loop platform – and delivery thrown in.

Akkerman suggests brand versus demand is a false construct anyway, because real people don’t think in those terms – only marketers.

“As a consumer … I don’t just specifically think, ‘Oh, I’m engaging with this brand just to understand their brand colours and that they exist and I’m aware of it’,” but then consciously move to specific performance channels when they want to buy, he says.

“So while as marketers we have segmented [brand and demand] because we see them as very different skill sets, we’re talking to the same consumer, and we’re trying to drive the same action. The whole point of brand advertising is to create brand awareness and intent to buy; performance is the execution on that intent. So in theory, those two should be much closer together,” says Akkerman.

“So we see advertisers coming to our platform and even when it’s just a pure brand message, we’ll put a call to action on the ad. And we see click through rate of 3, 4, 5 per cent of people saying ‘let me go execute, let me purchase from you’. And I think more and more that funnel – that separation of the two – is being consolidated into one.”

That kind of talk is catnip to marketers, with big brands pumping more into advertising over the last year – while seeking measurable results that keep their heads above water in the short-term. Hence Big Tech’s ad walled gardens booming – and despite pulling back on their own marketing spend.

Don’t say cheap

Uber hopes to join the major ad platform players. It’s long signalled its run-rate towards a billion dollar ad business since launching in October 2022 – and was close in Q4 2023. By now it’s probably already hit that target but Akkerman says with click through rates social platforms can’t get close to, Uber won’t be drawn into a game of cheap reach as it seeks genuine scale.

“I don’t like ‘cheap’. I don’t think cheap is the right word we should look for. We can talk about affordability… But to me, it’s all about return on ad spend. It should be effective and efficient. That shouldn’t translate to ‘cheap eyeballs’, that should translate to ‘how do I get my business goals in the most effective and efficient ways?’”

Whether procurement departments fully agree may determine how far Uber’s ad play scales – but Akkerman says it’s landing in Australia, Uber’s fastest growing market outside of North America.

He cites campaigns for Coke, Peroni at the Australian Open (using ads to nudge people to get a beer on-site during breaks in play) and Absolute Vodka at World Pride as all moving the needle on physical sales.

“Absolute Vodka saw a significant uplift – they saw 149 seconds on average time spent with their ads, they saw nearly a 4 per cent swipe right and people engaging with those ads on the platform. But then they saw a 28 per cent increase in sales revenue uplift onto the Uber Eats platform,” says Akkerman.

Meanwhile, he claims HSBC created an ad specific to people taking an Uber to the airport, which ultimately delivered “a 14 percentage point increase in likelihood to search for additional information about HSBC, and then a 6 per cent increase in intent to use their HSBC card … those are numbers you do not find on other platforms very easily.”

100% SOV

Akkerman attributes some of that success to brands being able to take “100 per cent share of voice” in its formats from booking in the app, during the ride and then afterwards, and says Australia will be getting new formats first as the platform aims to use the country as a test-bed for innovation.

Hence he sees money moving from both performance media channels – like search and social, as well as other display and video formats and traditional media, though Akkerman says Uber doesn’t think about taking share from any particular media – instead aiming for all of them.

“Don’t put baby in a corner,” he says. “We are a platform that allows brands to cut through all of the noise in order to engage with a consumer. So 100 per cent share of voice; you’re not competing with other content, you’re not competing with user generated content; it’s not an endless scroll … So if as an advertising platform we can help brands cut through to their consumer, then I would argue that we want to cut through these specific budgets within advertising.”

That’s one of the messages Akkerman was pitching to “hundreds of agency leaders in the Sydney market” last week, along with eschewing proxy metrics like viewability for harder metrics like return on ad spend, sales, revenue and profit.

“Just because something is viewable, doesn’t mean it drove my business objective, so how do we shift the conversation to that?”

Bots don’t book

Privacy also came up a lot in agency convos, says Akkerman, with Uber underlining it’s first party credentials as Google bids once more to get rid of third party tracking cookies.

“We are a logged-in, authenticated user that has put their credit card on this system … so when somebody gets in the back of that Uber, we know who they are, not just a digital representation [of them] but who they are – and we can personalise an experience for them and what they want to see in the real world,” he says.

Plus, he claims, Uber’s ad platform is “fraud free – bots don’t hail cars”.

The new living room?

But teenagers do – increasingly so. Per Akkerman, teenagers in the US are no longer in a rush to get driver’s licences. “The rate of 16 year olds going for their license has dropped by half and the rate of 17 year olds going for their license specifically in the US has dropped by a third … I think this is a trend you are seeing globally,” he says.

“If you look at the global trend towards electric vehicles, and the next evolution of that being autonomous vehicles, you can see a world where the back of the car ends up being the new living room. What a great time for a brand to figure out a way to authentically connect with that consumer while they are navigating around the world. This to me is one of the biggest opportunities as it pertains to Uber advertising,” says Akkerman.

But even ahead of that – if regulators ever allow fully autonomous vehicles – the former Pinterest global exec thinks the platform has something that the others don’t.

“I came from the social media platforms, and when you think about a digital interaction on those, it’s just that – it’s an interaction for a brand with someone’s digital avatar. When somebody is in an Uber, we know who they are, they’re authenticated. And we’re helping them move around IRL – in real life. So we’re able to understand their lifestyle, their preferences, and be able to authentically connect a brand to them in that conversation.”

How quickly brands buy-in will determine how fast Uber hits the $2 billion ad mark. Either way, the broader business is now finally profitable – largely thanks to advertising.

Get the full download via the podcast.