Winning Attention: How Gopuff converts engagement into growth

During MAU 2026, Jennifer Sudo, Managing Partner, M+C Saatchi Performance, and Tyler Stewart, Head of Marketing, Gopuff, discussed how to capture audience attention for meaningful business growth. The presentation is available here, and you can watch the full session here.

All brands know how hard it is to capture and convert attention, especially those in a highly competitive marketplace such as instant delivery. In a world where people skip, scroll, or dismiss advertising in an instant, brands have to be prepared to think differently to stand out. 

Harnessing entertainment as a growth tactic can provide an edge, and over the past 15 months, Gopuff has been testing this strategy with interesting results.

Truth hurts. Achieving scale is harder than ever

What used to work to drive user acquisition no longer scales efficiently. The simple fact is that, in many cases, paid media is more expensive, mobile performance is less predictable, and attention spans are shorter than ever. Channels that once delivered consistent, cost-efficient results are now less reliable, show diminishing returns, and increasingly rely on creative to capture attention and stop the scroll. 

For a brand like Gopuff, operating in a crowded instant-commerce category where everyone claims to be “fast, easy, and affordable,” the challenge was to give people a distinct reason to care.

Entertainment as a strategy

These challenges helped to forge Gopuff’s internal mantra: “entertain or die.” This means that, instead of treating content as a way to deliver performance messaging, Gopuff builds content that their customers would actually choose to watch, share, and talk about. 

For example, a New Year’s Eve partnership with artists Rick Ross and Wiz Khalifa turned a simple product promotion into storytelling, with each artist delivering the other’s drink and transforming the party guests into a memorable New Year’s Eve moment. As a result, the brand drove over 20 million views of the campaign in 24 hours and delivered the biggest Luc Belaire sales day in its history. Entertainment, therefore, did not just sit at the “top of funnel” to drive awareness. It also delivered a real spike in sales.

Delivering Memorable Moments

Brands today are not only fighting for share of market or ‘share of voice,’ they are fighting for a share of culture. Performance teams that still see entertainment or cultural connections as a “nice-to-have” risk missing the reality that people remember and revisit brands that evoke emotion on some level. When an ad feels like just another annoying interruption, advertisers are effectively paying to be ignored or, worse, to actually irritate potential customers. When advertising feels more aligned with content, brands have a chance to become memorable over time.

However, as Tyler Stewart, Head of Marketing at Gopuff, commented, “Entertainment does not mean being silly for its own sake”. It means being relevant to the moments and problems that matter most to your customers. For example, Gopuff’s Super Monday Off campaign, created with Tom Brady and Druski, tapped into a widely felt consensus: the Monday after The Big Game is a hard day to work and often an unproductive one.

By turning that customer insight into a coalition lobbying for a national day off, they generated over 260 million social views and record traffic to Gopuff’s app, while also driving purchases from a themed product collection. The lesson for any brand is clear: when your creative idea is grounded in a real human experience, entertainment can become a serious growth driver.

This approach requires consistency; entertainment as a strategy has to show up throughout the entire funnel, not just in “hero films.” A performance asset can still carry a clear offer and a strong call to action while holding on to a distinctive, human idea. The goal is for someone to recognize your brand from the tone, structure, or a joke within the first few seconds, even before seeing the logo. Over time, that familiarity reduces conversion friction because your product messages feel like the next chapter in a story people already know

Three practical ways to turn entertainment into measurable action: Entertain, engage, convert

1. Entertain

Entertainment-led marketing drives growth when built on a simple structure: entertain, engage, and convert. The aim is not to force every viewer to buy immediately, but to make each interaction meaningful enough that action feels like a natural next step. To do that, brand and performance teams need to align and build repeatable ideas that earn attention and then guide people towards the product.

One method to achieve this is through strategic partnerships. Instead of using well-known figures as one-off endorsers, brands can approach them as co-creators. In the New Year’s Eve campaign mentioned earlier, Gopuff chose Rick Ross and Wiz Khalifa not only because they are recognizable but also because each has a real product relationship with the brand. 

This approach allowed the creative to build a story around Luc Belaire and McQueen gin that felt true to the artists and natural for their audiences. Co-created concepts like this often drive stronger social sharing and word-of-mouth than traditional endorsement spots, as evidenced by the rapid spike in sales and conversation around the New Year’s Eve campaign.

2. Engage

During the MAU presentation, Jen and Tyler discussed how to treat creators as content channels, not just as a method for distributing campaigns or messaging. Instead of sending a rigid brief for a standard “haul” video, Gopuff worked with various creators and asked them to express how they used Gopuff in their own style. For example, Kali Koobir, a lifestyle creator, developed a baking video featuring Gopuff’s $2 organic eggs, using them as an anchor ingredient to highlight everyday value. While cooking isn’t core to her typical output, the concept aligned with her broader lifestyle positioning and allowed her to integrate Gopuff in a way that still felt natural. The brief asked each creator to provide a unique take in their creative style that showcased Gopuff’s benefits and features.

3. Convert

The buzzword of the MAU conference was, of course, AI. As Jennifer Sudo said, “Our philosophy is that AI is used as a creative accelerator, not a replacement for ideas.” Once a creative concept proves it can drive engagement or conversion, the team focuses on building on that foundation, extending the context into adjacent moments and use cases. 

For example, when the baking concept resonated, it became a springboard for additional content rooted in similar behaviors, like meal prep, hosting, and everyday making. AI played a role in helping translate that idea into a broader set of executions, particularly through static and lightweight formats that explored different visuals, product pairings, and scenarios. This approach allowed the team to expand on what was already working without starting from scratch, while still maintaining creative consistency. 

Does entertainment as a strategy actually drive growth?

As with all marketing, it is essential to measure and understand effectiveness, and therefore building a measurement framework that connects creative signals to commercial outcomes, instead of relying on a single metric or platform report, is essential to provide a holistic view of results. When this measurement framework is in place, brands can see which ideas contribute real incremental growth and which simply drive views.

Building a Measurement Framework

Understanding what’s actually driving growth requires looking beyond any single metric or system. There is no one source of truth, each measurement approach provides a different lens, and no single view tells the full story. The goal isn’t to choose one method, but to use each for what it does best.

For creator content, organic signals such as views and engagement rates help identify what audiences are responding to and which assets are worth amplifying through paid media.

Building on that, platform attribution informs day-to-day optimization, providing the fastest directional signal on which audiences, placements, and creative combinations are driving the strongest click-through rates and in-platform events. While platform data can over-attribute results, it enables real-time decision-making on what’s performing.

To understand performance more holistically, source-level attribution, using tools like MMPs and internal analytics, helps clarify where conversions are actually coming from and how channels work together to drive outcomes.

At the highest level, Media Mix Modeling (MMM) or similar incrementality measurement approaches provide a more complete view of what’s truly driving performance. MMM enables brands to understand how all channels and tactics contribute to overall growth when controlling for other variables, such as seasonality and promotions. 

Results for Gopuff media strategy

Within a broader media strategy, the evolution and extension of high-performing creative concepts played a meaningful role. Together, these efforts contributed to a 36% increase in new purchases and a 31% more efficient customer acquisition cost year over year, achieved with 6% lower media spend. These results reflect the combined impact of creative, media, and measurement working in tandem.

In Summary,

Entertainment is fundamentally a brand strategy, historically hard to measure compared to pure performance marketing. However, choosing how entertainment and performance are combined can help marketers identify which partnerships, formats, and channels are worth repeating and which to discontinue. With a robust measurement framework in place, brands can truly understand the impact of an entertainment-led brand strategy and use attention to deliver sustained growth rather than fleeting impressions.

• Watch the full presentation delivered at MAU here
• Download the deck here.

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