ARCHIVEGorillas UK Turns One Year of London Deliveries Into a Campaign
Gorillas UK's 'Whatever London Wants' is a multimedia advertising campaign created by independent agency The Or, launched in April 2022 to mark the grocery delivery brand's first year operating in London, drawing on data from more than eight million products delivered across the capital to showcase the diverse and often unconventional demands of Londoners.
Gorillas launched in London in April 2021, according to reporting by LBBOnline. The Or was awarded the Gorillas account in 2021 without a pitch, making 'Whatever London Wants' the agency's inaugural work for the brand. The campaign arrived at a significant milestone moment: one full year of operations in one of Europe's most competitive urban markets. Rather than rely on generic lifestyle imagery familiar to the rapid-grocery delivery category, the creative team anchored the entire campaign in genuine behavioural intelligence gathered from actual customer orders placed across London.
The campaign ran across an integrated range of channels in the United Kingdom, encompassing television, video-on-demand, radio, digital, social media, and out-of-home formats. Out-of-home executions included 48-sheet posters, six-sheet posters, large-format murals, and projections across London. Separate post-watershed and pre-watershed television executions were produced for TV and VOD respectively, reflecting the campaign's knowing use of innuendo drawn from real ordering habits — late-night tea bags, multiple bars of chocolate in a single order, and other everyday oddities that collectively paint a portrait of the city's appetite. As reported by Creative Salon on 11 April 2022, the campaign also incorporated a one-week promotional activation for customers. In the United Kingdom, the work represented Gorillas' first formal above-the-line push, establishing a data-led, irreverent brand voice from the outset.
ARCHIVEThe UK grocery delivery market presented a formidable strategic challenge in 2022. The UK grocery market was estimated at approximately £200 billion in 2022, according to Spryker, and rapid-grocery delivery was emerging as a meaningful sub-category within it. According to DataWeave, online food retail represented approximately 11 percent of all UK food retail in March 2022, signalling that digital grocery channels had moved well beyond early-adopter territory. Separate research cited by Spryker found that 60 percent of 2,500 surveyed UK consumers had bought at least some groceries online, with 23 percent preferring home delivery over collection.
Gorillas occupied a specific competitive position within this environment. Rivals including Getir and Deliveroo had already established significant brand presence in the United Kingdom, spending heavily on above-the-line advertising to claim the convenience narrative. Gorillas' strategic response, as articulated by Danny Barry, Head of Brand Northern Europe at Gorillas, was differentiation through authenticity. Barry stated, as reported by LBBOnline, that Gorillas is "not like other instant delivery services, so our comms need to feel different too," explaining the decision to partner with The Or without a competitive pitch. Barry also noted that the campaign "celebrates the fact that we know our customer base," pointing to data revealing Londoners ordered "everything from late-night tea bags to 32 chocolate bars in a single order."
Paulo Salomao, Co-founder and Business Lead at The Or, described Gorillas as "an ambitious startup that wants to shake up the market," as reported by The Drum. The creative strategy translated that ambition into a format built on specificity: real data, real orders, real London behaviour. In the United Kingdom, this approach positioned the brand not as a utility but as a service with intimate knowledge of its city.
The creative execution of 'Whatever London Wants' is built on a deliberate tension between data rigour and tonal irreverence. The campaign takes actual order data from Gorillas' first year of London operations and renders it as entertainment, leaning into the inherent comedy of real consumer behaviour. According to Campaign magazine, the work was characterised as innuendo-laden, deploying social-style multi-frame editing that moves at a pace native to digital content consumption while remaining legible on broadcast television.
The television commercial, running at 30 seconds, was the centrepiece of the integrated rollout. The decision to produce separate post-watershed and pre-watershed versions demonstrates a production strategy calibrated to audience context rather than a single-asset approach. The post-watershed cut allowed the innuendo embedded in the real-order data to land without moderation, while the pre-watershed execution preserved tonal clarity for broader audiences. This dual-versioning reflects a sophisticated understanding of broadcast scheduling as a creative variable, not merely a compliance requirement.
The out-of-home executions extended the campaign's visual language across London at scale, with 48-sheet and six-sheet posters, murals, and projections bringing the data-driven creative to street level. The Drum's Senior Reporter Amy Houston noted in coverage published on 12 April 2022 that the campaign's use of genuine ordering habits gave the work an authenticity unusual for the category. Production credits for 'Whatever London Wants' are not publicly documented in full; however, the campaign was produced in the United Kingdom in April 2022 through the collaboration of Gorillas UK's brand team, led by Danny Barry, and The Or's creative and business leadership under Paulo Salomao. The integrated nature of the execution — spanning broadcast, digital, social, and physical formats across London — reflects a production scope consistent with a brand making its first significant above-the-line statement.
No independently verified campaign performance data for 'Whatever London Wants' — including reach figures, brand uplift measurements, or sales attribution — is publicly available beyond the engagement metrics recorded on the campaign's video asset. The video garnered 11,488 views and 26 likes as recorded at the point of submission, figures that reflect the asset's documented public footprint rather than the campaign's full measured impact across television, VOD, radio, and out-of-home in the United Kingdom.
Structurally, the campaign carries several markers of effectiveness. The decision to anchor creative in verified first-party data — more than eight million deliveries — provides a factual foundation that competitors in the rapid-grocery delivery category could not easily replicate. The integrated channel mix, spanning broadcast television to street-level murals across London, gave the work both mass-market reach and urban cultural presence simultaneously. The dual-versioning strategy for television demonstrated media planning sophistication that maximised the campaign's tonal range without diluting either execution. As reported by The Drum and Creative Salon, press reception at launch was positive, with coverage emphasising the campaign's distinctiveness relative to category norms.
The campaign also functioned as a brand-building foundation: according to LBBOnline, the data-led, irreverent positioning established by 'Whatever London Wants' was subsequently broadened into a wider global platform. Clapboard rates 'Whatever London Wants' at 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its strategic premise with confidence and creative specificity, held from a higher score by limited independent verification of downstream impact.
'Whatever London Wants' is Gorillas UK's first television and multimedia advertising campaign, created by The Or and launched in April 2022. It drew on data from more than eight million products delivered across London in Gorillas' first year of operation to celebrate the diverse and unconventional ordering habits of Londoners.
The Or created the campaign. The independent agency won the Gorillas account in 2021 without a competitive pitch, as reported by LBBOnline, making 'Whatever London Wants' the first work produced under that partnership and Gorillas' first above-the-line campaign in the United Kingdom.
The campaign ran across television, video-on-demand, radio, digital, social media, and out-of-home formats in the United Kingdom. Out-of-home executions included 48-sheet posters, six-sheet posters, murals, and projections across London, with separate post-watershed and pre-watershed TV edits produced, as reported by Creative Salon.
Gorillas built the campaign on analysis of more than eight million products delivered in London during its first year of operation. Danny Barry, Head of Brand Northern Europe, noted orders ranged from late-night tea bags to 32 chocolate bars in a single order, as reported by LBBOnline.
Gorillas differentiated through verified first-party order data rather than generic convenience messaging. Where competitors including Getir and Deliveroo relied on broader lifestyle advertising, Gorillas used specific, real London order behaviour to demonstrate intimate local knowledge, a strategy described by The Or's Paulo Salomao as reported by The Drum.
Clapboard rates 'Whatever London Wants' at 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's confident strategic execution and data-led creative specificity, moderated by the absence of independently verified performance metrics measuring brand uplift or sales impact following the April 2022 United Kingdom launch.
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