For years, advertising has been built around a tidy diagram: awareness at the top, a purchase at the bottom, and a neat journey in between. It was always a simplification. Today, it barely resembles how people actually behave.
People don't plan their cravings, their last-minute dinners, or the moment they realize they're out of something. Real life isn't a funnel. It's a series of moments that arrive when they arrive. Someone orders flowers on a Friday, restocks the fridge on Sunday, grabs medicine late on a Tuesday night. None of it is random, but neither does it fit a linear path. And those everyday moments are exactly where brand decisions actually get made.
That shift in behavior is the single most important thing happening in our industry right now, and it's why the conversation is moving beyond "retail media" as a narrow category toward something broader: how brands participate in consumer life more holistically.
For a long time, advertisers have targeted audience segments; broad descriptions of who someone is. But who you are tells you far less than what you're doing right now. A parent doing the weekly shop and that same parent ordering a treat on a Saturday night are two completely different commercial opportunities.
At DoorDash, together with its global portfolio of brands, Wolt and Deliveroo, we see those occasions as they happen: the craving, the refill, the celebration, the forgotten essential. Each one is a real, repeatable signal of genuine intent. That's a fundamentally different starting point than a static audience list, and it lets brands show up with relevance, in the moment, rather than hoping to be remembered later.
What makes Wolt's role in this distinctive is where we operate and how. Across more than 30 countries in Europe, we're bringing modern, closed-loop advertising tools to markets where brands and merchants have often had no real alternative. In many of these countries, this kind of advertising simply didn't exist before.
We're able to do that because Wolt Ads combines DoorDash's proven advertising technology with deep local expertise. Our teams understand how customers behave in their own markets, what they buy, when, and why, and that local knowledge is what turns global technology into genuinely relevant advertising. Advertising works best when it feels native to a local community and to an everyday moment, not bolted on from somewhere far away.
That combination is what the bringing-together of DoorDash, Wolt and Deliveroo is really about: one platform that gives brands access to high-intent moments at scale, with the local relevance that makes them land. Global brands increasingly want consistency across markets and relevance within them. Historically they've had to choose. They no longer have to.
There's a lot of noise about AI in our industry, and not all of it is useful. My own view is practical: AI should remove complexity from advertising, not add to it.
What used to demand large teams and fragmented systems (targeting, bidding, creative optimization, measurement) can increasingly be handled through automation, freeing people to focus on the decisions that genuinely need human judgement. The value isn't smarter targeting for its own sake, it's helping businesses understand what's actually working and adapt faster, in real time. That's where AI earns its place: faster, better-informed decisions, and less of the manual overhead that's held marketers back.
The opportunity for brands is to stop fighting over the single moment of purchase and start showing up across the moments that lead to it — woven into the real rhythms of everyday life, measurably, and where it's relevant. As grocery and retail continue to expand alongside restaurant delivery, those moments are multiplying, and so is what brands can do with them.