By Megan Graham
A TikTok of "The Traitors" and "Love Island" cast member Rob Rausch handling a rat snake. A video of comedian Ziwe bossing around a cast of young men in a "Bad Boyfriend Bootcamp." A NSFW post on X about Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime performance.
It's all right if nothing in that list immediately screams "order delivery right now," according to DoorDash, the company behind the posts.
Its social-media strategy under Zaria Parvez, who joined last August after making language-learning app Duolingo a viral star, is less focused on pushing immediate return-on-investment with its social efforts and more on drawing engagement on its posts and building a halo effect. The brand's work leans heavily on pop culture to do that.
DoorDash last month reported higher fourth-quarter revenue as orders rose and forecast higher-than-expected orders for the current quarter, but said results could be dinged by further investments in areas such as its Deliveroo and international businesses.
Parvez spoke with the WSJ Leadership Institute's Megan Graham about the new strategy and how her team approaches the risk that social media always presents. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WSJLI: What was the change you were hoping to make in terms of the social strategy when you joined?
Parvez: Even before I joined -- I honestly cannot take credit for this -- the biggest thing that DoorDash was most excited about was how we bring on social-first. When I heard that, I was like, "That seems like such a cool challenge."
Before, social was used a little bit more as a distribution channel, where we're doing this really awesome creative work that's probably a little bit more traditional advertising and let's use social as a place to distribute what we're already doing.
I think the biggest shift that I wanted to push the team on is what if social wasn't the distribution channel, and it was the insight base, the heart of the idea, and we use the other things that we were traditionally using as distribution channels -- what does that flip look like?
WSJLI: How many people work on social media internally, other than you?
Parvez: I think we're at eight people, and we're hiring for two. It's a dream to have that much resource for social media.
WSJLI: You guys did a really fun social campaign with Ziwe, where the comedian known for putting celebrities in the hot seat was running a "Bad Boyfriend Bootcamp" with culture's notoriously bad boyfriends. It got a lot of positive buzz, since it was just funny as content and didn't really feel like an ad. How did that idea come together?
Parvez: When we were thinking about Valentine's Day, we were like, "How do we stand out in a very loud moment?" We actually found a social insight on TikTok, with people commenting that we need to enlist our boyfriends in boot camp, they're bad gift givers, so on and so forth. So we were like, "What if we actually created this bad boyfriend boot camp?"
As a brand, you can't really lecture. Who was a personality that could take that message for us? Ziwe was the person to do it. Every one of the guys was kind of a bit of an Easter egg. They hit different fandoms. We had an influencer from the comedy world. We had West Wilson from "Summer House." Even if you don't know Ziwe, even if you don't know West, maybe you do know one of these other creators that are being used in this cast to widen the net.
WSJLI: How do you think about talent in terms of how they work with you on social-media content? For instance, you've had so many fun social videos with Rob Rausch, the "Traitors" and "Love Island" star who has been talked about massively in recent weeks.
Parvez: We often in a traditional advertising world will prioritize a hero video, and then everything is extra if it happens. But the way that our team operates is these people are known to be on social and what the fans are excited about is if you give them something that they understand through the Easter egg lens, but it's also a new piece of content. For Rob Rausch, it's what is he going to say now? Or a new shirtless pic.
We always build in six to seven ancillary pieces of content. That, to me, is actually more important than rights to a linear asset, for example.
WSJLI: You guys have also shared content where you DM celebrities or reality stars and ask what the last thing is they've bought from DoorDash, which seemed to do well.
Parvez: From celebs to normal people, you'll just hear random stories of people using DoorDash for different things in their lives. Yes, for takeout, but someone's like, "I once ordered a veil on DoorDash two hours before my wedding."
How do we showcase the breadth of the things that you can get on DoorDash in a social-first way? Because a testimonial is not really going to hit the same.
A lot of people ignored us. But it became this really cool cultural-first way of being like, "Look at all the use cases."
WSJLI: I feel like you guys have done a good job of making the marketing feel in on the joke.
Parvez: The mantra of our team is lean in to the meme. Either you can go with culture or you can push against culture, and nobody cares. It's much easier to go with culture.
Within that, though, we have our own social framework of what are the lines we're willing to cross and not cross. If we made a decision to take a certain risk, we kind of always anticipate there will probably be 10% to 15% of negative sentiment. And that is an OK tolerance level for us. But if we think it's going to hit like, the 30% to 50%, probably not worth going down this path.
You're probably going to piss some people off. You've just got to make sure it's not the wrong people.
WSJLI: I have to imagine that was part of the calculus with the Bad Bunny post that you guys did on Super Bowl Sunday. [The NSFW post on X used a GIF of the rapper dancing suggestively to make light of the opposition some people had to him performing at the game.]
Parvez: Usually the commenters are maybe 5% of the entire post engagement, but they tend to be the loudest. Comments do drive narratives and people screenshot that. So it's a very intricate balance.
WSJLI: For something like that Bad Bunny post, was that something where you decided to go to your bosses for permission or did you feel like you had the OK to do what you felt was right?
Parvez: Definitely more of the latter. I cannot say how thankful I am for the creative freedom that the social team has. They're like, "You know our boundaries, you know what we can or can't do -- frickin' run, don't let us stop you." Even if there was a moment where we crossed the boundary, delete the post and that's a learning. It's very rare that a brand stays canceled.
Even with that, we posted it, and I decided, I'm just going to send this over to our CMO, just because everyone was so into it. They were laughing, it was not even a thing. I was like, "OK, that's a line I can cross and understand." So it's kind of like a test-and-learn every time.
WSJLI: At the end of the day, your team is in service of creating business. How much are you thinking about KPIs [key performance indicators] when you're doing any of this?
Parvez: It's a bit of a push and pull. There's moments where we want to prioritize share-of-voice and social and cultural relevancy and understand that going viral now might not necessarily mean that we're going to immediately get sales right away. And there's moments where we have paid-media levers that are totally meant to convert you in that moment.
WSJLI: I know that's hard for brands to do, when so many marketing teams are under pressure to look at the data to prove out everything they're doing.
Parvez: The marketing leadership here is saying, "We're not looking for you to move the needle yet. Maybe eventually, but right now, we're just looking for breakthrough and cultural relevance. Your big goal is, 'Can you go viral once a month?' That's what we care about. And tell us the levers that you need to make that happen." I'm very thankful to be in that environment.
Write to Megan Graham at megan.graham@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 05, 2026 06:00 ET (11:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments