Unlocking the secrets to DoorDash’s advertising success with Peter Giordano

DoorDash Ads became a billion-dollar business in 2024, three years after launching.

DoorDash made the decision years ago to only charge restaurant advertisers doing sponsored listings when ads convert to an order. Peter Giordano, head of ads platform and growth at DoorDash, says that model ensures trust and evidence that investment works. It also aligns with the interests of their partners, especially local mom-and-pop businesses, who make up over half of its advertisers.

In a conversation with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik, Giordano shares more insights about DoorDash’s 42 million monthly active users and why he thinks commerce media is an evolution, not a fleeting trend.

Given that your customers are using your platform in a really intentional way, how does that impact the ad experience?

One of the decisions that we made from the beginning that we’re still very proud of today is that [with] our sponsored listings product for restaurant advertisers, we only charge advertisers if it works.

Oh, that’s interesting.

What do we mean by that? [Advertisers] don’t pay for impressions. They don’t even pay for clicks.

A restaurant advertiser only pays if that ad converts to an order for them, and they only pay on a cost per order model. That was a decision we made for a couple of reasons. Because to your point, [our] consumers are high-intent. We want to make sure that the ad products are actually working, and we’re charging our advertisers only when they’re getting a return for it.

Over half of our advertisers are local mom and pops and small and medium businesses, and we want to de-risk the proposition for them. They don’t have to front an advertising budget without understanding what it’s going to return. We want to make sure that they can feel comfortable that the money they’re spending is actually driving their business forward.

For the marketer who is planning their media holistically, what channels does commerce play well with?

We started with on-site ad products because, as we talked about, our customers are very high-intent. Obviously, reaching them in that moment is the best and the most impactful place to start.

But we also continue to get questions from our advertisers about more: “What more? How else can I talk to your customers? How else can I use your data? How else can we work together to build a more full funnel and more holistic story?”

So we’ve continued to build products where we’re now going off-site with our Ads product. We started with search, which is obviously still very high intent — just outside of the DoorDash ecosystem. And then we’ve added more social platforms, and more creative formats, and now display and upper-funnel tactics on behalf of our advertisers.

I think commerce plays at all of them, but just for different outcomes and different metrics. So CTV or even digital out-of-home, much more upper funnel tactics, still make sense to be tied back to retailer data or commerce data, but obviously a very different purpose than a sponsored listing in an app.

And that’s what we keep hearing from our partners: “How can we work with you to engage with the customer at every single one of those steps?”

Is commerce media a trend or an evolution?

It’s definitely not a trend. It’s not a fleeting trend. It is here to stay and is evolving. I would say it’s an evolution, but it is even moving every single day.

The name almost doesn’t matter. It’s the underlying principles of allowing a brand or a marketer to engage with the customer in their moment of need — or their moment of discovery.

Because the ways that consumers today are researching, discovering and ultimately buying is changing so rapidly. And there are so many different places that a brand and a marketer can engage with their customer. And that’s why retail media or commerce media, whatever you want to call it, is so important.

You began your career in media. NBC News, the Today show, Time Inc. What did your media experience help you with now?

Stylistically, for lack of a more eloquent phrase, I learned how to just get stuff done.

When you work in live television — where people are yelling at you, you have news breaking, you have a red light blinking, you have a live TV show that’s about to go on the air to millions of people — then you have no choice but to figure it out. There’s no deadline pressure like that.

The second is I really learned how to adapt. So when I worked at NBC, broadcast news and broadcast television was still the thing. It set the scene for the day. It’s how everyone got their information.

While I worked at NBC, Twitter was invented and the iPhone came out. Consumers started fragmenting and getting pieces of information from different places and different touch points. And quite frankly, a decades-old business model was starting to be disrupted.

And the news industry and the media industry started wrestling with how do we adapt and how do we change?

If you fast-forward to today and obviously all [of] the disruption [that] is happening in the advertising in the marketing space — t’s kind of a little bit of a similar mindset. It’s changing all the time. It’s changing every day.

And how do you sort of stay ahead of new customer trends, new industry trends, new technology and make sure that you’re able to adapt with that as you go.

When I look back at all those years ago, I think about what we went through and what we were living and how that that is, has made me think differently today.

I so relate to that. That disruption started at the beginning of our careers, but for better or worse, we’ve always been used to it evolving so fast.

Yeah, exactly.