As Drizly's first and (technically) last copywriter, I simply could not allow my experience with the company to be boiled down to a handful of (albeit brilliant) emails and social media posts. So instead, I present this epic tale of an epic brand...
Chapter 1: An Epic Hiring
The year was 2019. Following the departure of its email associate-slash-makeshift-copywriter, Boston-based alcohol delivery company, Drizly, decides to take a chance on a promising (if relatively green), daring, witty, verbose, handsome, and incredibly humble actual copywriter to complete their even humbler 5 person team. Me. The news sends shockwaves through the marketing world. There are celebrations. Riots. Global blackouts. And yet, not even a single AdAge post about it.
Despite this snub, he/me gets to work, transforming Drizly’s brand from a few cute emails and low-engaging tweets per month into an all-encompassing character that touches every point of the customer journey - from email and direct mail to the onsite experience, organic and paid social, OOH, SEO, and whatever other channels we could find/had the budget for.
Next, he/I was tasked with the herculean, uh, task, of building out our first brand book - figuring out our target audience, writing our manifesto, defining our positioning and personality... and coming up with a very true story about our bear logo.
Not yet satisfied with the scope of our reach, I then took to writing some of our first TV spots that, shockingly, did not nab me my first Academy Award. (I know, I know, the snubs continue.)
Chapter 2: Pandemic Pandemonium/The Irreverent Years
It was March of 2020 when, after building a solid rapport with our ever-growing audience, I was sent home along with the rest of Drizly HQ “for probably like a week or two” because of a virus that was spreading across the country. Those two weeks became 2 years, during which the Drizly company/brand exploded.
We didn’t see it coming. We weren’t prepared for it. Our work doubled, then tripled, then multiplied by eleventeen. Faced with a 700% influx of customers, we suddenly found ourselves navigating the incredibly dicey waters of a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime event. We introduced the new members of the Driz NationFamArmySquad — we never quite figured out what to call them — to thousands of new liquor stores, then had to let those same members know when said new liquor stores inevitably ran out of product. We tracked state-by-state regulation updates while guiding our customers through health protocols and safety regulations that changed on an almost hourly basis. We sent out comms urging customers to support Black-owned, women-owned, and LGBTQ+-owned brands and tried to keep people calm during the most contentious election in American history. All while trying to be both sensitive to the chaos happening around us *and* tell the same kind of stupid jokes we built our brand on.
So yeah, it was tricky. But as they say, something about coal into diamonds.
We created some of our weirdest, most engaging content in this chaos, stepping up our push notification game to target "of the moment" cultural events ranging from new album drops to professional wrestling events. I continued to emphasize humanizing our brand as a way in, and not just so I could force everyone to look at my big dumb face in the occasional email (see above).
And then, my career and arguably life peaked when I managed to convince Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul (you may know them from TV and movie films) to surprise a few unsuspecting customers on their birthdays with drinks delivered via pandemic-appropriate robots. We said the robots were for "safety precautions" but the truth is that we just really wanted to use robots.
In any case, this often nonsensical and borderline unhinged content seemed to resonate with people. We even nabbed an AdAge award for the Hottest Brand of 2020. Still waiting on that trophy, though.
Even the time we apologized after sending out a "personalized" email that contained nothing more than Lorem Ipsum text seemed to land, earning us a ton of organic press and an Iterable award for the Best Marketing Campaign of 2020. Sex and drug-filled parties with celebrities were soon to follow, surely.
Chapter 3: The Overhaul
Of course, after the high comes the lull. By the summer of 2022, we had been acquired by Uber (yay!) but lost a lot of teammates in the process (boo.). With the pandemic in the rearview mirror - or at least headed that way - Drizly was stagnating. Budgets were slashed. Growth was slowing. You know the story. People were comfortable and/or desperate to get out of their houses again, which was great, if not great for us. So we did what any marketing team does at that time: sit down, take stock of things, and point out how outdated and shitty our creative was.
It was time for a brand refresh, alright.
Visually, this meant bringing Drizly's look from a bunch of red slashes and Microsoft Word-looking font to something sleek, modern, and all the other words marketing people salivate over. New brand colors were added. Iconography became a thing. Photography was un-stockified.
For me, this meant updating our manifesto, shifting our personality from "irreverent" to something with more mass appeal, and cutting down our more boisterous emails to drive action.
Strategic shifts were not far behind. We focused on influencer and celebrity partnerships, eventually landing the likes of Joel McHale and Jenny Slate for one of the funniest campaigns I've pitched: Roast My Gift.
You might not think that your average customer would sign up to have their holiday gifts publicly mocked, but 1000+ entries and 1.7 million engagements says different.
Of course, no recollection of this time in Drizly history would be complete without mentioning a few of my favorite achievements of stupidity. Did I say stupidity? I meant good branding. Yeah. Branding.
Chapter 3a: Drink Thoughts
What is Drink Thoughts? Well, do you remember those classic SNL skits, Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey? What about those books, Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey? If you do, join me in putting on your reading glasses and checking out this series of social videos that made famously funny people Paul Feig and T-Pain laugh (and I think you know how difficult a task that is).
Chapter 3b: The time we created a horny ASMR hotline but for drink sounds
When we were given the chance to do a stunt for the horniest day of the year, it only made sense to jump on the ASMR trend and create a hotline where lonely singles (or adventurous couples) could go to listen to the sensual sounds of bottles being popped. The phone number should still work, if you're into that sort of thing.
Chapter 3c: These incredibly silly podcast ads
All you have to know is that our old ads weren't working, so I suggested brand-ifying them up. They are incredibly dumb but also ended up being some of our most successful podcast ads ever and that's showbiz, baby.
Chapter 4: The Old Yellering
Unfortunately, hilarious podcasts were not enough to save us. In the end, single-product apps like Drizly were simply not viable in today's digital landscape, and Drizly couldn't overcome the stacking odds against us.
Even more unfortunately-er, we learned that, due to several legal requirements I can't get into, we would be sending 19 communications between January and March of 2024 letting people know we were going out of business. Nine. Teen. Knowing that there was no way to avoid the overbearing and repetitive nature inherent in this ask, I came up with our final campaign, dubbed The Never-Ending Goodbye.
The reaction was, as you might expect, universal acclaim.
So yeah, what a ride it was. I hope this unnecessarily thorough recap gave you half as much joy to read as it did for me to write. And if it didn't, well, at least half of us are happy.