In this episode
Peter Giordano, GM of Platform & Growth Services at DoorDash Ads, explains why a commerce platform that can move a consumer from awareness to a delivered order in 30 minutes is no longer a lower-funnel ad channel. He walks through what DoorDash’s intent signal shows that a traditional retailer’s purchase history does not, why brand and performance KPIs inside advertisers are the real constraint on full-funnel buying, where models make autonomous calls inside DoorDash’s homegrown ad stack versus where a person still sets the rule, and what DoorDash had to submit to third-party audit before asking advertisers to build business cases on its incrementality numbers.
Key takeaways
- The funnel didn’t shorten, it collapsed. With DoorDash, a brand can go from awareness and discovery to having its product at a consumer’s door in 30 minutes — which Giordano calls unprecedented and a significant change in what an ad placement actually is.
- DoorDash sees the moment a need appears, not just the purchase that followed. A traditional retailer knows what you bought; DoorDash sees the occasion or trigger that brought you to the app — running out of packing supplies mid-move, forgetting the balloons, deciding what to order before a binge.
- Two-thirds of DoorDash consumers are undecided when they arrive. They know they need something but are still open to discovering what, which is what makes the platform an awareness surface rather than only a conversion one.
- Intent patterns are behavioral, not demographic. People order healthy food on Tuesdays but not Fridays; iced coffee is an afternoon treat rather than a morning caffeine boost; afternoon-treat buyers are five times more likely than any other purchase to tack on a pet treat; toothbrush orders spike late night on weekends.
- The blocker to full-funnel buying is the advertiser’s own org chart. Giordano describes a performance lead who wanted to fund offsite media and asked his brand counterpart to pay for it, and was told: “Great, but that’s not my KPI. My KPI is cheap reach and cheap CPMs.”
- An awareness unit can still be traced to sale. Spotlight, DoorDash’s rich-media homepage unit, is driving over a third of its sales from first-time buyers for the brand — awareness spend with a conversion receipt attached.
- Restaurant ads are charged on cost per order only — no impressions, no clicks. That protects small advertisers with no marketing budget, and it holds DoorDash accountable: serve irrelevant ads and nobody acts on them and the ads business stops existing.
- Incrementality gets measured through three separate lenses. Shopper incrementality (LiveRamp matching against advertiser first-party data has shown 80%+ of a brand’s DoorDash shoppers are entirely new), purchase incrementality (Circana studies on sales that follow a DoorDash activation), and media incrementality.
- DoorDash is the first commerce media network to have its entire incrementality methodology verified by the Alliance for Audited Media — covering data governance and customer disclosure, not just the math, because brands build business cases off those numbers.
- The category name should disappear. Giordano’s prediction for a year out: stop saying commerce media and say media, because every consumer touchpoint is now a purchase occasion and the brand-versus-commerce split is an imposed construct.
Chapters
- 00:01:07 — When the ad, the shelf, and the storefront become one surface
- 00:02:44 — Peter Giordano’s role at DoorDash Ads
- 00:03:13 — What DoorDash Ads is, and the fastest route to a $1B run rate
- 00:05:13 — What DoorDash sees that a traditional retailer’s data doesn’t
- 00:06:37 — Iced coffee, pet treats, and late-night toothbrushes
- 00:07:46 — Helping CPG brands adjust to a 30-minute funnel
- 00:08:32 — When brand KPIs and performance KPIs collide
- 00:10:15 — Spotlight: an awareness unit that traces to sale
- 00:11:06 — Where models decide and where people set rules
- 00:11:47 — Smart Campaigns for SMB restaurants
- 00:15:45 — Pointing AI at internal users, not just advertisers
- 00:16:12 — Holding the consumer side of the win-win-win
- 00:18:37 — Cost per order as an accountability mechanism
- 00:19:30 — LiveRamp and the three lenses of incrementality
- 00:21:34 — Getting the methodology verified by the Alliance for Audited Media
- 00:22:47 — Personalization, agents, and the machine buyer
- 00:24:41 — Why “commerce media” should stop being a category
- 00:25:38 — How Giordano stays agile
Why a 30-minute delivery window changes what an ad is
Giordano’s framing is that the distance between an impression and a delivered order has collapsed to minutes, and that a channel behaves differently once that’s true. A brand running a homepage placement on DoorDash isn’t seeding demand it hopes to harvest somewhere else later; the same surface carries the discovery, the decision, and the transaction. That’s why he resists the lower-funnel label — not because DoorDash also wants brand budget, but because the mechanics of the placement no longer match the category it was sorted into.
What DoorDash sees that a purchase history can’t show
A retailer’s data describes what a shopper bought. DoorDash’s describes why they opened the app. Giordano calls it seeing the moment you realize you need something: the move that ran out of packing supplies, the birthday party missing balloons, the Friday night with a show queued up and nothing ordered. Because two-thirds of consumers arrive undecided, the signal is about mindset in motion rather than a completed transaction, and the patterns that emerge — healthy food on Tuesdays, iced coffee as an afternoon treat, pet treats riding along with it — describe when a category is winnable rather than who buys it.
Where the model decides, and where a person still sets the rule
DoorDash built its ad tech in-house, and Giordano is specific about which parts run autonomously: auction dynamics, auto-bidding, ranking. The newer case is Smart Campaigns, aimed at the hundreds of thousands of SMB restaurants on the platform. His reasoning is a customer-problem argument rather than an AI argument — he’s never met a small restaurant owner who’s a sophisticated marketer, nor should he have, and DoorDash was asking those owners to carry the cognitive overload of targeting and discount decisions. Smart Campaigns reduces that to one button and an objective, and lets the system vary the offer and creative per consumer. The same test applies internally: the teams he oversees build AI tools so ad ops and sales aren’t spending half a day entering information into Salesforce.
Why charging per order is a consumer-protection mechanism
DoorDash’s restaurant ads product bills on cost per order — not impressions, not clicks. Giordano frames that as protection for small merchants who need to know their dollars produced something, but the sharper point is what it does to DoorDash. If the ads aren’t relevant, nobody acts on them and there’s no revenue. Alongside holdout groups that check every new ad unit for consumer degradation, and a deliberately low ad load, the pricing model converts consumer relevance from a stated value into a revenue dependency.
What incrementality has to mean before a CFO should believe it
Giordano splits the question three ways. Is the DoorDash shopper incremental to the ones the brand already reaches — work done with LiveRamp against advertiser first-party data, where in some cases 80%-plus of a brand’s DoorDash shoppers turned out to be entirely different people. Is the purchase incremental, including purchases outside DoorDash that follow a DoorDash activation, which Circana studies have been used to test. And is the media incremental — the spend-versus-no-spend question. On that last one, DoorDash put its entire methodology, plus data governance and how results are disclosed to customers, through Alliance for Audited Media verification, which Giordano says makes it the first commerce media network to do so.
What changes when the buyer is an agent
Consumers can already chat with DoorDash in natural language to build recipes and carts, and Giordano expects ad products to follow that surface wherever it goes. His framing of personalization is utility rather than targeting: a homepage that reduces the number of clicks to the thing you wanted is a good ad experience, and serving a vegan a double bacon cheeseburger is a failure of the underlying relevance system, not a creative problem. The agentic shift, in that reading, raises the penalty for bad relevance rather than introducing a new discipline.
FAQ
What makes DoorDash different from a traditional retail media network? A traditional retailer’s data shows what a shopper has purchased. DoorDash sees the trigger that brought someone to the app in the first place, and roughly two-thirds of its consumers are still undecided about what they want when they arrive — so the platform carries discovery as well as conversion.
Is retail media still a lower-funnel channel? Not on a platform where a brand can move from awareness and discovery to a product at the consumer’s door in 30 minutes. Giordano’s argument is that the funnel collapsed on the consumer side and the brand-versus-performance split inside advertisers is now the artificial construct holding full-funnel buying back.
Where is AI actually making decisions inside DoorDash’s ad system? Auction dynamics, auto-bidding, and ranking run autonomously on models in DoorDash’s in-house ad stack. Smart Campaigns extends that to SMB restaurant advertisers: the advertiser states an objective, and the system chooses the offer and ad iteration per consumer.
How does DoorDash verify that its ad results are incremental? Through three lenses — shopper incrementality (LiveRamp matches against advertiser first-party data, showing 80%+ new shoppers in some cases), purchase incrementality (including Circana studies on sales outside DoorDash following an activation), and media incrementality, whose methodology has been verified end to end by the Alliance for Audited Media.
How does DoorDash keep advertising from degrading the consumer experience? Every new ad unit is tested against holdout groups to confirm no consumer degradation, ad load is kept deliberately low, most ad products are built on the organic browsing and search signal the consumer is already giving, and restaurant ads are charged on cost per order so irrelevant ads generate no revenue.
What should advertisers expect as AI agents start placing orders? DoorDash already supports natural-language cart and recipe building, and Giordano expects ad products to follow consumers into whatever interface they use. The requirement doesn’t change — personalization has to function as utility, which means relevance failures become more costly, not less.
About Peter Giordano
Peter Giordano is GM of Platform & Growth Services for DoorDash Ads. In this role, he is responsible for a variety of initiatives including global expansion; agency partnerships; scaling platform operations and productivity; and developing external integrations and offsite expansion.
Previously he was COO at Seva, a venture-backed enterprise software business, where he led go-to-market for their early stage knowledge automation SaaS platform. Before Seva, he held various positions in Revenue Operations and Marketing at Simulmedia, a video advertising technology company, eventually serving as SVP of Sales Operations & Strategy. He started his career in various facets of the media industry in New York – including positions in strategy and marketing at Time Inc.; and roles in the network news division at NBC Universal, including that of producer on the “TODAY” Show.
Peter received his undergraduate degree in Government cum laude from Harvard University, and an MBA with honors from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He lives outside of New York City with his wife and two daughters.
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Transcript
[00:01:07] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of the Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. What happens to advertising when the distance between seeing an ad and having the product in your hands closes to a matter of minutes? Agility here isn’t about moving faster across the same map, it’s about noticing the map changed, that the ad, the shelf, and the storefront have quietly become the same surface. Today we’re gonna get into why commerce platforms are becoming full-funnel media rather than a lower-funnel ad channel, where AI is actually making the decision inside an ad system and where a person is still setting rules a machine executes faster, and what an enterprise advertiser has to be able to verify independently for retail media measurement to hold up. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Peter Giordano, GM Ads, Platform, and Growth Services at
[00:02:38] Greg Kihlström: DoorDash. Peter, welcome to the show.
[00:02:41] Peter Giordano: Hey Greg, nice to see you. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:02:44] Greg Kihlström: Looking forward to diving in here in a second. But before we do that, why don’t you give a little background on you and your role at DoorDash?
[00:02:50] Peter Giordano: I’ve been at DoorDash for about four and a half years as part of our strategy and operations team for the ads business. I oversee a bunch of teams that are responsible for scaling our ads business efficiently, a lot of our operations teams, also our global expansion team, and a couple of other, new bets here at DoorDash. I helped launch offsite ads and, and some other innovation we’re doing in the business.
[00:03:13] Greg Kihlström: So I know a lot of our listeners use DoorDash, like myself, for, for delivery services. But, DoorDash Ads has seen phenomenal growth as a commerce media network. Can you give us a little background specifically on that? you know what, what is DoorDash Ads? What it, what is it? Who’s the customer and, and all that?
[00:03:33] Peter Giordano: We launched the business about five years ago, built on top of DoorDash’s core mission. So DoorDash’s core mission is to grow and empower local economies. The ads business is now to become the marketing platform for the local economy to help brands, retailers, merchants reach consumers in a, in their neighborhood as they try to discover the best of what’s available to them nearby. So we launched about five years ago. We quickly became the fastest commerce media network in history to reach a billion dollar run rate, which we’re very proud of. But I think what we’re most proud of is why we were able to achieve that. We were able to achieve that because we are delivering really strong results for our advertisers who continue to come back. We’re delivering really strong, relevant
[00:04:18] Peter Giordano: advertising for our consumers who are receptive to it and are engaging with it, and we’ve built this really strong flywheel. So to your question of who’s the customer, I think this actually goes back to a core DoorDash value that we have, which is always to find the and and nether, never the either/or.
[00:04:39] Peter Giordano: And so what I mean by that is, for us, the customer is the consumer and the advertiser. We will never do something that is good for an advertiser or ad revenue but bad for a consumer experience or, or vice versa. Every product we have built is built to deliver really strong consumer relevance, help consumers discover more of what’s in their environment, and, and also deliver really strong results for our advertisers and we’re really proud of that.
[00:05:07] Greg Kihlström: That’s great. That’s great. Yeah, that’s the, the win-win-win, right? [laughs] So it’s, that’s great.
[00:05:12] Peter Giordano: That’s the, that’s the goal.
[00:05:13] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, absolutely. So, let’s talk a little bit more about that. And, certainly on this show we’ve talked, a bit about retail media networks, but DoorDash isn’t a traditional retailer as, as, as we’ve talked about, yet it’s built, to, to your point, one of the fastest growing retail media networks. What does DoorDash see about consumer intent that a traditional retailer’s data doesn’t necessarily show?
[00:05:39] Peter Giordano: a traditional retailer knows a lot about what you have purchased, maybe what you just bought. The way that we like to think about DoorDash is we can see the moment that you realize that you need something.
[00:05:52] Peter Giordano: We can see an occasion or a trigger that has brought you to DoorDash in the first place. You’re moving and you’re running out of packing supplies. It’s the kid’s birthday party and you forgot to order the balloons, or it’s just a Friday night and now you’re trying to be inspired about what to order as you’re about to binge a, a television show. So all of our consumers are really high intent But two thirds of them are actually undecided on what they want when they come to the platform, right? They know they need something, but they’re still open to sort of, like discovering it. And as a result of this kind of fluid decision-making and need it now mentality, we can learn a lot about the consumer mindset and how that sort of changes as they move through the DoorDash app. So just a couple like
[00:06:37] Peter Giordano: fun examples to put a point on that and then, and then I’ll go a little bit more macro to answer your question. But, we see all sorts of interesting habits like people order healthy food on Tuesdays, but not on Fridays. They’re, they’re, they’re done with it by the end of the week.
[00:06:52] Peter Giordano: iced coffee is an afternoon treat. It’s not a morning caffeine boost. People that order that afternoon treat also tack on a pet treat five times more likely than any other purchase-
[00:07:03] Peter Giordano: … because maybe they think the pet deserves a treat as well. And, and my favorite is that toothbrush orders spike like crazy late night on weekends, which you can probably guess why.
[00:07:16] Peter Giordano: Maybe that, maybe that DoorDash user ended up somewhere that their toothbrush is not. Um,
[00:07:21] Peter Giordano: … and while these are kinda like funny one-off facts, what, what they do together is they reveal really interesting patterns about how needs change across days, across consumers, across categories, across moments, and it’s sort of stitching that fabric together that I think has made DoorDash’s data, and therefore our commerce media network, a really interesting place for advertisers to engage with potential customers.
[00:07:46] Greg Kihlström: Well, and I think that, that immediacy, like the, the, the toothbrush anecdote, it’s that immediacy there. a lot of brands may not be necessarily used to that, that quick, a, a turnaround so to speak. How does, how do you help a, a brand make that kinda shift, like a CPG brand or something like that?
[00:08:09] Peter Giordano: It’s, it’s a good point, and you mentioned this, at the beginning that the, the f- sort of what we used to k- I guess, call the funnel and the consumer journey is certainly collapsing tremendously.
[00:08:19] Peter Giordano: Now with DoorDash, a brand can go from awareness and discovery to having their product at a consumer’s door in 30 minutes. That’s pretty unprecedented and a significant change.
[00:08:32] Peter Giordano: There are a lot of artificial and archaic constructs, quite frankly, that still exist in the ecosystem that make that a little challenging for brands to reconcile. we all know that there are a lot of brands that are still set up with the, the brand-building and the awareness team over here with one set of metrics-
[00:08:50] Peter Giordano: … and KPIs that are very different than the performance team over here. We worked with a customer actually where the performance person was spending all of his money in our on-site ads product, ’cause that’s the most down funnel, and he wanted to drive performance. Big believer in off-site as well, and he wanted to spend media off-site. He just didn’t have the budget left. He tried to convince his g- brand counterpart to spend his dollars on our off-site product, ’cause it’s using better data, it’s tracing back to sale, it’s giving really robust reporting, and that person was like, “Great, but that’s not my KPI. My KPI is cheap reach and cheap CPMs.”
[00:09:28] Peter Giordano: So like these, these weird constructs are, I think, actually now starting to come to the surface and starting to break. And the more that we can work with our brands and show them that DoorDash does it all, we are an awareness vehicle, but also a conversion vehicle, then we can start bringing those teams together. And maybe a year from now, that second gentleman that I just referenced will have a different KPI and will see the value in doing awareness media in a smarter and more data-driven way.
[00:10:00] Greg Kihlström: I mean to your p- yeah, to your, to your point, with the, with the consumer part of the funnel collapsing, the brand, s- support infrastructure’s gotta, collapse may be the wrong word, but you know-
[00:10:12] Peter Giordano: Yeah
[00:10:13] Greg Kihlström: … work more closely together.
[00:10:15] Peter Giordano: Exactly. And we’re, and we’re building products that try to do that. So we just released a, released a new product called Spotlight, which is a really rich media, sort of immersive homepage ad unit. So gone are the days of static homepage banners, and this allows brands to tell their story in a little bit more interesting way. And while it is definitely an awareness vehicle, we are also seeing that not only is it driving sales, it’s driving over a third of sales from new first time buyers for that brand. So it’s an awareness product, but it still can be traced to sta- sale, and still is driving new customers that then will be repeat customers. So the more that we can make our product suite sort of do all of these objectives and work with
[00:11:00] Peter Giordano: advertisers about a full funnel solution, hopefully, to your point, that will start some of the collapsing at these brands as well.
[00:11:06] Greg Kihlström: Well, and part, part of that, that collapse on the consumer side is certainly a lot of consumers using AI-based search and, and tools. And so I wanna talk a little bit about– maybe let’s talk about that, from the, from the platform side first, just AI’s role here. And certainly, AI th- it’s a broad umbrella, so it, it could cover a lot of things. But I, I wonder, from, from the, the DoorDash perspective, where is a model, genuinely making, genuinely making calls, bidding, ranking, creative assembly versus a person setting rules and, where, where do, where is the line today that, that works the best?
[00:11:47] Peter Giordano: That’s a great, that’s a great question. There, there are plenty of places in our product where models are autonomously making the decisions, a lot of the things that you would probably expect, right? We’ve built all of our ad tech in-house. It’s all a homegrown system, so things like auction dynamics and auto bidding and ranking, all of those are completely built on models and are, and are running as, as they should. one product that we recently released that is also completely built on models that we’re pretty excited about is something we call Smart Campaigns. So th- A big segment of our advertisers are actually SMB restaurants.
[00:12:26] Peter Giordano: Hundreds of thousands of SMB restaurants that want to get that Chinese food order or that Mexican order from the person in their neighborhood. Previously, we were asking these local business owners to make a lot of decisions about their marketing strategy on DoorDash. Who do you wanna target? What discount do you wanna offer? What this, what that? I don’t know, Greg, if you’ve ever worked at a restaurant. I have, and I’ve never met a small restaurant owner who’s a really sophisticated marketer.
[00:12:52] Peter Giordano: Nor should they be, and we were asking them to take on all this cognitive overload when what they’re really good at is running a restaurant.
[00:12:59] Peter Giordano: So we’ve now built an AI-driven product that says, “Just click one button, tell us what your objective is, and we’ll do the rest.” You will see a different promo offer and a different ad iteration than maybe I will and maybe someone else will, and we’re just sort of letting the system learn and drive the best results for the advertiser and take that onus off the person who’s actually, wanting to buy the campaign with us. And I think it’s a really strong example of where we can put these models to use if they’re really solving a customer problem.
[00:13:29] Peter Giordano: And in that case, it really, really is.
[00:15:08] Greg Kihlström: So I think ad tech is one of the… we, we tend to talk about AI as if it was invented a couple years ago [laughs] or something. But, some of these mechanisms have been in place for, decades, at the, at this point. But it’s, it’s great to know. ’cause I, I just think, I mean, even, even myself, like placing ads or something, like when you give someone an option, they’re go- they’re going to think that they need to have the expertise to, to know what to choose, right? But giving– making it easier, just that seems like a great use of some of these tools to be able to just make it easier on people so they can, get, get the, get the business, right? [laughs] So.
[00:15:45] Peter Giordano: Yeah, 100%. And even one of, one of the teams that I oversee, our customer, in this case, are internal users. So like what AI tools and systems can we build to make it easier for our ad ops team, make it easier for our sales team to not spend half their day entering information into Salesforce, right? So like that is the north star of how can we– what’s the job to be done, and how can we make something easier for an external customer, an internal customer, or anything in between.
[00:16:12] Greg Kihlström: Well, and, and I wanna get back to the, what we were talking about earlier, that, that, that win-win-win where, we’re, we’re doing what’s in the bus- best interest really of, of everyone. Certainly optimizing ads from the, either from the platform itself or even from the business placing the ads perspective is one thing, but also making it valuable to that consumer and continuing to build the consumer trust, which ultimately, that, that’s what creates value in the, in the platform, right? How do you, how do you think about, like what’s the, what’s the mindset that, keeps all of those things kind of in bal- I mean, you need all, all three, right? But, what, what’s the mindset that keeps that continual focus on that end consumer as well and just making sure that you’re providing a valuable
[00:16:57] Greg Kihlström: ad experience for them?
[00:16:59] Peter Giordano: I love that you asked that question because consumer trust is just so core to what we do at DoorDash. Forget about the ads team, even just the company-
[00:17:06] Peter Giordano: … in general, right? We have a really strong relationship with our customer and want to maintain that. Fundamentally, for the ads team, anything we do, launching a new ad unit, a new ad product, whatever it is, we obviously test everything multiple different ways. We have holdout groups where we evaluate everything to make sure that there’s no consumer degradation, as a result of a new ad product. Hopefully you’ll see that our ad load is pretty low, and certainly not intrusive. So we take a lot of pride there just to make sure that the core customer relationship is maintained, as ads are introduced. Secondly, most of our ad products are really built on the core organic experience that a consumer is doing in DoorDash in the first place.
[00:17:52] Peter Giordano: So we know a lot about you based on your previous history with DoorDash, and we believe that, kind of a personalized experience is actually expected customer utility these days, if it’s done well. So if you can see a really relevant ad on the homepage that reduces the number of clicks you need to take to order something, that’s a really good thing, but it has to be relevant. You’re doing a lot when you’re in DoorDash. You’re starting to search for a type of cuisine, or you’re starting to browse different carousels. And then in that moment, we can then serve you a relevant ad based on the signal that you’re already giving us. So I would say Most of what we’re doing is really rooted in the core experience that you came to DoorDash for in the first place, and then just building on top
[00:18:37] Peter Giordano: of that so that hopefully the ad is actually a really good thing and a really positive experience for you that actually enables your journey in, in DoorDash. just one tiny example to put a pin on that, our restaurant ads product is only charged on a cost per order. We don’t charge for impressions or clicks. And while that’s obviously great for the merchant and the advertiser, especially those small businesses that don’t have huge marketing budgets and want to be confident that their dollars are actually driving results, it holds us to account as well because we better be serving really relevant ads or else no one’s gonna act on them and our ads business will cease to exist. So we’ve made a lot of decisions like
[00:19:22] Peter Giordano: th- decisions like that, that ensure we are also building a really good and consumer-centric ad product.
[00:19:30] Greg Kihlström: I love that. And let’s talk a little bit about measurement then. And so, recently, DoorDash, has a partner with LiveRamp as well. certainly, that would suggest a, a focus on, sophisticated measurement, data collaboration. can you talk a little bit about, ad-advertisers, specifically the, probably the more s- sophisticated ones, but any advertiser is looking for incrementality of some sort. Whether they name it as such or, or not, they’re looking for incrementality. how, how does something like this partnership or even just the way that you provide measurements to advertisers help with that?
[00:20:13] Peter Giordano: We, we evaluate incrementality almost through three different lenses, and we hold ourselves to all of these, in order to have a really successful business. So first is just the incrementality of the shopper. Is the shopper on DoorDash incremental to the shopper that the brand or the retailer is getting elsewhere? And, and that’s where some of our really interesting work with LiveRamp has come into play, matching data with an advertiser’s first party data. In some cases we’ve seen that 80% plus of the DoorDash shoppers for that brand are completely incremental and different-
[00:20:49] Peter Giordano: … than their first party shoppers. Right? So like pha- phase one, make sure it’s a different shopper. Incrementality stage two is incrementality of the purchase. Is it a different purchase that wouldn’t have happened in the real world? And also, is the DoorDash purchase maybe then driving subsequent incremental purchases outside of the DoorDash ecosystem? And we’ve done some studies with Circana, for example, to prove that out and show how much more incremental sales the brand is getting after a DoorDash activation that they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten. So that’s a really exciting component of incrementality. And then the third, which is really I’m sure the crux of your question, is the incrementality of the media. Are you spending ad dollars to drive a sale that you would not
[00:21:34] Peter Giordano: have gotten otherwise? and that’s really, really important to us obviously as an ads business to the point that we just recently announced that our incrementality methodology has been verified by the Alliance for Audited Media. We’re the first commerce media network to put our entire incrementality methodology through that process and have a third party independent stamp of approval, if you will, because it’s needed. Brands need to know that the numbers and the incrementality results they are seeing and they are building business cases off of are real. And, and it’s not just the incrementality methodology that we got verified on. It’s everything from data governance to, customer
[00:22:19] Peter Giordano: disclosure and how we’re positioning these results. The entire thing has been verified and we’re really, really proud of that, and we know that advertisers are going to continue to demand that from us and from the industry at large. So sort of three-pronged answer to your question, but we really try to think through this ver- in a very nuanced way to make sure that the results that advertisers are getting and that just our brands are getting even organically with DoorDash are truly incremental to their business in driving their bottom line.
[00:22:47] Greg Kihlström: So I wanna talk about one, one last thing before we wrap here, and just, one thing we ta- are talking about more frequently on this show is just, when the buyer is, there’s a, there’s a human behind it, but the buyer’s a machine, right? And, the– whether that’s, consumers using AI search mechanisms or, agents of, of their own. So customers have increasingly personalized experiences, but they’re also, again, they’re, they’re using, and they will continue to use agents more and, and things like that in, in that process. What, how, how are you thinking about this in terms of, of DoorDash ads as just the consumer behavior continues to evolve and, and, let– we can start with just that demand for more personalized experiences.
[00:23:39] Peter Giordano: I think DoorDash in general is obviously keeping up with these consumer demands. You can come to DoorDash now and, and, and, and chat with us in a natural language way and, build recipes and build carts and do things in a much more organic and agentic way that consumers are demanding these days. And then obviously our ad products will, will follow suit. We want to make sure that we are serving ads in a personalized experience however that consumer wants to engage with us. Kinda goes back to what I was mentioning before that, like hopefully your homepage looks a way that is familiar to you and will make your job in DoorDash easier. If you’re a vegan, I hope we’re not serving you a homepage ad for a double bacon cheeseburger.
[00:24:24] Peter Giordano: And, and, and vice versa because we’re learning a lot about you that consumers expect that type of personalization Our ad products will follow that, and the core DoorDash app and DoorDash experience will continue to keep up with this evolving customer demand for an agentic experience as well.
[00:24:41] Greg Kihlström: Love it. Well, Peter, thanks so much for joining today. I got a couple last questions as we wrap up here. first one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[00:24:55] Peter Giordano: I’m gonna flip that, and I’m gonna say one thing we’re not gonna be talking about, this is my, my soapbox-
[00:25:01] Peter Giordano: … moment, is we’re not gonna be talking about commerce media, and we will be talking about media. As you and I have been talking about-
[00:25:11] Peter Giordano: … the funnel is collapsing. Every consumer touchpoint is a purchase and a commerce occasion nowadays, and this artificial construct that this is commerce media, and this is brand media, et cetera, really needs to start going away. So that’s my, that’s my take. We’ll be talking about media. We’ll be talking about all the same things you and I just talked about today, but hopefully without some of these artificial constructs that have been imposed on us for decades.
[00:25:38] Greg Kihlström: Love it. Well, yeah, we’ll have to have you back on, and, and, and we can do just that. [laughs] That’s great. And last question for you, what do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:25:51] Peter Giordano: That’s a great question. I love that. I’ll give two answers. One, staying really close to our customers, talking to customers, meeting with customers. W- we have– we’re forming customer advisory boards, just getting into the field with them and learning about what they’re asking and how their business is evolving, and we do that very, very, very regularly. And I think that’s very important at all parts of DoorDash, right? To stay very close to the customer. so that’s one. And then two is learning from my team members. there are plenty of people that are a whole lot smarter at AI than I am, and I will set up 30 minutes with them and, and do crash courses and just try to learn from other people’s areas of expertise. We’ve even blocked time on our entire team’s calendars now or certain dedicated learning sessions every week where you can just heads down learn a new skill, stay agile, just do heads down practice in, in AI or whatever it is that you need to get better at. So we’re trying to impose that for the team, and, and I’m taking that very seriously into heart as well.
