Project Sundae: a recipe for success

As JET’s long-term digital partner, DEPT® has been helping the team promote its offering to customers across multiple markets for over seven years, creating thousands of creative assets every year to help the brand retain (and gain) market share and, ultimately, increase orders. 

In the face of economic uncertainty and the resulting need to ‘do more with less’, JET had a problem: how could it produce more global creative that helps to solve local market problems, while increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of operations? 

JET turned to DEPT® to help solve this problem and Project Sundae was born. We built a bespoke automation system, pulling together all of the ‘ingredients’ to build and serve the most effective creative assets. And the proof is most certainly in the pudding…

Project Sundae works by creating a bespoke library of JET-branded templates, that have been built using JET’s Brand Guidelines and are based on the brand’s different market needs, into DEPT®’s proprietary creative automation tool, Lightspeed. 

Lightspeed is best described as a data feed, containing all creative asset elements such as footage, images, copy, translations, logos etc. The feed, like a spreadsheet, consists of rows and columns. Each column represents a different variable, like language, logo or copy. Then each row consists of all the different variables needed.

Our technology combines all of these data inputs to automate the production of individual assets, resulting in the efficient production of consistent creative across JET’s 19 markets, in 21 languages. 

Once assets are produced, Lightspeed feeds these to our proprietary front end tool that allows JET’s relevant internal teams to review the asset and either give feedback or sign off the creative assets. 

After they’re approved, it then plugs into various ad manager APIs (like Smartly and ByCape), allowing it to be built into ad sets and published through media platforms like DV360 and Meta for each market.

Project Sundae has the ability to create static and motion assets to plug into Meta, Snap, Google UAC and DV360 in different formats and sizes. 

The automated system can support multi-channel asset creation for anything from a certain offer or restaurant group, launching a new offering (like grocery), to supporting campaigns or a specific sponsorship, such as the UEFA Champions League®.

When reviewing performance against the objectives set…

Increase the volume of creative assets produced

We now produce more than 25,000 assets per year through Project Sundae – a 40% increase vs manual production. 

Reduce the time and resource needed to produce creative assets

By harnessing automation, we have reduced the time it takes to build creative, design and messaging from months and weeks to minutes and hours, as well as reduced the amount of resource required from around 70 designers to three who can manage the automated process, enabling creatives to focus on their craft and make continual optimisations. 

Improve the speed and efficiency of asset approval processes

Moving from a fragmented QA process to a centralised bespoke QA asset approver, straight into JET’s different ad managers, creates a seamless experience from production to media buying.

Accelerate consistency of asset production across markets to build global distinctiveness

Project Sundae ensures brand presence is uniform and consistent across every market, helping JET to build global distinctiveness versus key competitors.

While the main drivers of this brief were largely operational, the effectiveness of Project Sundae also generated significant cost efficiencies and performance improvements. 

When comparing the performance between manually produced assets and Project Sundae, our automated campaigns resulted in: 

400% reduction in asset production costs for JET;
26% reduction in in-platform CPO (cost per order);
33% increase in CTR (click through rate). 

Project Sundae has been running live and ‘always on’ since Q1 2022 across multiple markets, and as a result of its success, 17 markets are using it to help them run their lower funnel and consideration activity, and it continues to consistently outperform benchmarked BAU manual activity.

DEPT® is proud to have developed a longstanding partnership with Just Eat Takeaway.com, that has seen us collaborate on everything from establishing a B2B marketplace to celebrity campaigns with Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg. Find out more below.