Deliveroo ad platform boosts revenues in UK

Deliveroo's ad platform has helped the food delivery company grow revenue by 5% in the first half of its financial year.

In interim results published today, the company explained it had "made further progress scaling our advertising business" which had helped it reach an annualised revenue run-rate of $69.7 million—the amount of revenue that Deliveroo projects the business will make from advertising over the year—in the second quarter of 2023. This compares with a run-rate of $50.7 million in Q4 2022.

The report said: "The vast majority of this revenue currently comes from our sponsored positioning and search results product for restaurants and grocers. We continue to take a consumer-first approach, wanting to strike the right balance between helping merchants drive incremental demand, while always prioritising the consumer experience."

The brand said that it had ads from more than 50,000 merchants during the first six months of 2023, up 31.6% from 38,000 in the same period last year.

There were also campaigns with big brands such as PepsiCo, Quorn, ITVX and Sky Glass, Sky's smart TV proposition.

Campaign reported in November 2022 that the deal with Sky Glass would allow the business to reach Deliveroo's millions of "highly engaged" customers checking the progress of their order a number of times.

Deliveroo Media and Ecommerce launched in the UK in summer last year. The platform is served by Criteo, which handles ad tech and media sales.

Deliveroo reported a 6% year-on-year fall in the number of orders (145.2 million) it received in the first half of 2023 globally. In the UK orders fell 1% to 80 million.

Global revenue grew 5% to $1.27 billion and in the UK it rose 11% to $762 million. In the UK operating profit was up 106% to $156 million.

Elsewhere in the report Deliveroo noted that it cut back on marketing and overhead costs by 6%.

In the UK, Deliveroo's advertising agency is Pablo. The agency released a campaign named "How do you Deliveroo?" in April last year.