Last week, DoorDash planted its first real flag in the advertising industry.
The company announced that it crossed a billion-dollar ad revenue run rate, meaning it hasn’t earned $1 billion from ads in one fiscal year, yet, but it expects to in 2025. This milestone is set to occur only a couple of years after it began running off-site extension campaigns for CPG brands, like those carried by convenience or pharmacy chains in the DoorDash app, to go along with sponsored listings for restaurants.
To get its off-site ads program off the ground, DoorDash worked with a small retail ad tech startup called Symbiosys. Which DoorDash acquired last week for $175 million.
Symbiosys is now officially part of DoorDash, though the two companies have worked closely together over the past couple of years, DoorDash ads platform GM Peter Giordano said.
AdExchanger caught up with Giordano and Bashar Kachachi, founder and CEO of Symbiosys, to discuss their collaborative plans for the DoorDash platform, as well as whether Symbiosys will continue supporting other retailers and marketplaces moving forward.
AdExchanger: I know DoorDash has been an early customer of Symbiosys, but how did the acquisition come about?
GIORDANO: We’ve been working with Symbiosys for about two years. [They’ve been ] partners of ours in launching our off-site ads business for CPG advertisers and helping those CPGs extend their reach beyond the DoorDash app onto search and social while still driving consumers back to an immediate point of purchase where we can close the loop on reporting.
We were seeing strong performance not just from a reach and awareness perspective, but also from our own new customer acquisition perspective. [Symbiosys] also hits multiple points in the funnel at once, which is exciting for our advertisers.
Then I would say phase two of our relationship began probably about eight months ago. We really challenged the Symbiosys team by saying, “Can you extend these capabilities for restaurant advertisers?”
KACHACHI: DoorDash was really the ideal partner for us: They bring deep relationships with both retailer merchants and with brands, as well as scale and operational excellence.
It’s kind of a force multiplier for us, and our mission of enabling retailers to integrate off-site ads and ads across all digital channels. These days we’re more focused on social platforms like Meta and TikTok and other video channels, too. For brands, the big unlock is to reach retail shoppers across these channels while leveraging retailer first-party data and targeting, foreclosed with measurement.
So Symbiosys will continue to operate its network of other retailers? The focus doesn’t shift entirely to DoorDash?
KACHACHI: We’re going to continue operating under Symbiosys, supporting all of our existing retailer partners and their brands. Basically, we’ll continue everything that we have been doing on that front.
GIORDANO: And we want them to continue serving their retailers. Bear in mind, a lot of their retailer clients are also on the DoorDash marketplace. So we’re obviously fully excited for them to keep growing that part of their business as well.
What’s on the road map?
KACHACHI: The road map remains similar to what we’ve been working on for the past year or so. We’re going to continue working on adding and supporting more off-site channels, right? So that means support for Meta, TikTok, Google, Pinterest, Snap and other channels where we can expand our audience capabilities.
A big part of the draw right now for off-site retail is to target the shoppers on those channels.
GIORDANO: As far as it relates to DoorDash, the main area that we’re collaborating on is to continue to scale and build off-site ads for our restaurant partners. That just started six months ago so we’re continuing to build and iterate.
Bashar, you listed a bunch of social networks to add as potential ad extension partners. Would it make sense to do a similar integration with a programmatic company like Criteo or The Trade Desk? Or Amazon?
KACHACHI: Programmatic is definitely something we’re looking at. Nothing specific to announce today, per se, but it’s a really important area, I think, that we’re definitely looking at. Our mission is to cover all off-site media in the fullness of time.
But for specific partnerships and when that dictates our road map, we don’t have any specific news.
We started in search primarily. But at least for the past couple of years, social video has been on equal footing, I’d say, as part of the media mix.
The other one is Amazon. It’s interesting that you mentioned Amazon. We don’t partner with Amazon today in terms of the media channel for a couple of reasons. One is, obviously, Amazon is a destination for on-site sponsored products, which we don’t do at Symbiosys. We’re exclusively off-site ads. And then Amazon DSP would be bundled with the broader set of programmatic. Which, again, is something that’s further in the future.
*This interview was edited and condensed.
