Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, DoorDash: Meet the 2024 Global Marketer of the Year Finalists

Vote for Kofi here →

Kofi is the CMO who has turned the utility of meal delivery into a cultural triumph, helping DoorDash become the largest food delivery company in the US – with a 67% share in the meal-delivery category. Much of the company’s success can be attributed to its marketing, which mixes customer-centricity and personalization with brand building.

Recognition has been widespread, with DoorDash winning the Titanium Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Lions thanks to its promise to gift one lucky person everything that was advertised in every ad break in the Super Bowl – including vacation worth $20,000, a BMW, a $50,000 house deposit. The giveaway was worth nearly half a million dollars in total, attracting eight million entries and serious engagement.

Other work includes taking advantage of an error that allowed users to order cheesecake without pay. Kofi and his team were able to quickly leverage the opportunity to gamify menu selection and drive a double digit rise in traffic as well as a significant bump in orders for the Cheesecake Factory. 

Born and raised in Ghana, Kofi has a unique perspective on what it means to be a foreign-born black person in America. Corporate initiatives include “Kitchens Without Borders,” which supports immigrant and refugee-owned restaurants, and “Monday Night Mentorship”, a community program aiming to guide professionals on their corporate journey.

Kofi was an agency leader before joining Bacardi and later Facebook, becoming CMO of DoorDash in 2022. He sits on the boards of many organisations including One Young World. 

1. What first attracted you to marketing as a career choice?

In a word: chance. I studied Economics in College and thought I'd end in investment banking or management consulting, but found marketing essentially by accident after a chance encounter with a Leo Burnett recruiter at a job fair. That encounter led to a summer internship at Leo Burnett working on the Kellogg's business, and I found that the intersection of creativity, psychology and commerce really appealed to me. So after I graduated a year later, I went back to Leo Burnett and began my career there.

2. What were your favourite pieces of work or initiatives in the past 12 months and why?

I have two to highlight – one was highly visible and widely-lauded, and the second was largely invisible to the outside world but every bit as important.

The first is our 2024 Super Bowl campaign - "DoorDash-All-The-Ads" - which showcased that you could get everything on DoorDash by delivering a product from every Super Bowl ad to one lucky viewer. The campaign drove 11.9 billion earned media impressions, over eight million submissions, and contributed to all-time highs in terms of the percentage of DoorDash consumers transacting in non-restaurant categories.

The second is the work we've been doing internally - born of an error in CRM systems that sent an email to the wrong audience - to uplevel the craft, quality and relevance of the way we communicate with our customers across all sides of the marketplace. We've overhauled processes, systems, and technology, and as a result, are seeing increased engagement.

3. What is the most effective leadership action have you taken in the past 12 to 24 months to deliver stand-out innovation and creativity from your marketing organisation?

I focus on building a culture that champions risk and celebrates failure for the learning that it provides. Whether it's DoorDash-All-The-Ads, where there was no true playbook for a first-of-its-kind campaign, or the approach our Dasher Marketing team took to build an entirely new grassroots channel to outfit Dashers with gear (leading to improvements in quality), we're often starting from a blank page or having to make decisions with impartial information.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I find that the greater the ambiguity, the more important it is to empower teams to own their decisions, to experiment, and to keep striving for more. This is encapsulated in our values, "dream big, start small" and "choose optimism, and have a plan," and this mindset has been foundational to our ability to consistently deliver stand-out innovation and creativity.

4. Changing our focus to the future, thinking about your marketing organisation over the coming years: what do you see as priority development areas in terms of skills and capabilities for CMOs and their teams?

While there's a very good argument to be made for embracing AI and leveraging it across all the relevant surfaces and workflows (and we're certainly doing that), I believe other areas that get less attention but are every bit as important include: continuing to deepen our understanding of our customers in the context of a rapidly evolving category; continuing to build our business acumen so that we create fit-for-purpose marketing and can demonstrate the connection between marketing activity and business impact; and building an agile organization that can evolve and adapt in real time to technology shifts, business needs, and customer preferences.

5. What are you most excited about for 2025?

We have this amazing opportunity to continue to expand the mental model for all the possible ways people and businesses can use DoorDash - for example, we just launched David's Bridal. There’s also a ton of runway to drive scaled awareness and adoption of DashPass (our subscription program) as the best way to experience DoorDash. DashPass helps people save on DoorDash ($0 delivery fees, reduced service fees, item level discounts, exclusive promotions) and off DoorDash (savings on Lyft and Max), and we're excited to bring those benefits to consumers.

Vote for Kofi here →

The 2024 shortlist for WFA Global Marketer of the Year also includes:

• Asad Ayaz, Chief Brand Officer, The Walt Disney Company and President of Marketing, The Walt Disney Studios and Disney+
• Diana Frost, Global Chief Growth Officer, The Kraft Heinz Company
• Marcel Marcondes, Global Chief Marketing Officer, AB InBev
• Aruna Ravichandran, SVP, Marketing, Networking & Collaboration, Cisco