2025 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Canada’s food-delivery battlefield is a three-way stalemate. SKIP, Uber Eats, and DoorDash share the same restaurants, the same fees, and the same undifferentiated promos. To pull ahead, SKIP needed a moment so culturally charged that it would make people forget the other delivery apps button — if only for a day.

That moment arrived when rap’s decade-long cold war — Drake vs Kendrick — erupted. A single line in Kendrick’s response track “Euphoria” name-checked a tiny Toronto restaurant, New Ho King, and the internet instantly geo-tagged the feud. In the span of hours, a neighbourhood Chinese joint became ground zero for hip-hop gossip.

The brand’s opportunity: hijack the conversation before competitors do, help a small business survive the incoming tidal wave of attention, and make Skip the delivery brand of record for the biggest music story of the summer.

When rap beef got fans hungry for more, Skip let them skip to the good part — the fried rice at the
heart of it all.

To hijack the moment and help this small business make the most of the limelight, they dropped “The Diss Count”: turning lyrics from both artists into a promo code — 50% off when they order New Ho King.

The Plan? At 6 a.m. on May 10, the Push Ups fallout began when social listening flagged the New Ho King lyric just minutes after Euphoria dropped. The owner greenlit an aggressive one-day promo, provided Skip handled order throttling.

By 9 am, the promo code “Disscount” (50% off New Ho King orders) was loaded into Skip’s CMS, accompanied by a push notification and app banner targeting GTA users.

By 10 am, the streets started talking, as two digital billboard trucks looped Queen St. W., Dundas Square, and Scarborough with creative that remixed Drake and Kendrick lyrics into “Skip the Diss-count.” OOH units were geo-fenced within 5 km of New Ho King redirected QR scans straight to the restaurant’s SKIP menu.

At noon, the influencer relay began as a few Toronto creators across hip-hop commentary, food-tok, and meme pages received custom “lyric menu” kits and posted within the hour, with all content linking to a pre-populated SKIP cart featuring Kendrick-approved “fried rice w/ dip sauce.”

By midnight, Drake fired back with “Family Matters,” a video shot partly inside New Ho King that dropped at 12:01 a.m. Meanwhile, always-on community management kept the momentum going, as the social team replied to every rap-battle meme with GIFs of dumplings and promo links — keeping Skip top-of-thread on X, Instagram, and TikTok. Every touchpoint was orchestrated inside 30 hours: social listening, promo creation, OOH, in-app, influencer amplification, and a rapid refresh when Drake counter-punched. The entire spend was CAD $78K — light for paid media, heavy on hustle.

Planning’s unlock was reading culture not as noise, but as a signal. Within hours of the diss track drop, the agency spotted a 4,500% spike in New Ho King mentions — evidence that this wasn’t just a moment, it was the moment. That real-time cultural intel gave the agency the confidence to act immediately, skipping pre-testing and leaning into relevance.

They designed a single-restaurant, 50% off code to ride the meme while protecting margin (with basket sizes up 1.8×). And with culture always evolving, they built smart contingency plans to adapt if the narrative shifted. Because true cultural strategy isn’t about chasing trends, it’s about moving at the speed of meaning.

New Ho King logged its highest sales day ever — three weeks of orders condensed into just 36 hours. Average order value rose by 18%, and Skip captured 100% of the restaurant’s delivery orders after competitors voluntarily paused service to cope with the volume.

The campaign generated 6.06 million earned-media impressions across Curiocity, blogTO, Toronto Star, Complex Canada, and hip-hop subreddits. Skip also achieved a 72% share of voice in delivery-brand mentions tied to the rap battle, according to a Brandwatch snapshot from May 13.

Credits

CLIENT:
SKIP
Rachel MacAdam - Vice President, Marketing
Melanie Fatouros-Richardson - Vice President, Communications and Government Relations
Jennifer Blackburn - Head of Brand & Sponsorship
Phil Sylver - Creative Director
Daniela Profenna - Head of Partner Marketing
Bethany Skelton - Senior Marketing Manager, Brand Strategy
Hannah Korsunsky - Senior Communications Manager
Emma Bowers - Communications Manager
Avery Hoffman - Social Media Manager

AGENCY:
COURAGE INC.
Co-Founder and CCO - Dhaval Bhatt
Co-Founder and CCO - Joel Holtby
Partner and President - Niki Sahni
Partner + CSO - Tom Kenny
Executive Creative Director - Raul Garcia
Copywriter - Kushal Lalvani
Art Director - Jack Hwang
Executive Producer - Clair Galea
Rachel D’Ercole - Producer
Saloni Wadehra - Group Account Director
Emily Broad - Account Supervisor
Tino Monk - Account Executive
Rami Dudin - Group Strategy Director
Marcus Barrie - Editor
Sunaina Arora - Post Producer

Transfer+Online
Alter Ego Inc ALTEREGO
Colour - Alter Ego
Colourist - Lily Henry
Colour Assistant - Vika Svishchova
Producer - Sam Omand
Exec Producer - Hilda Pereira

Audio
Vapor Music

PRODUCTION:
FUZE REPS
Nicole Gomez - Executive Producer
Sandy Nicholson - Photographer
Priya Belliappa - Production
Josh Meek - Assistant
Paul Jerinkitsch - Retoucher

PR AGENCY:
POMP & CIRCUMSTANCE
Alexandra Wassell - Account Manager
Brianna Nelson – Account Manager