Menulog has launched the next phase of its What’s Good in Your Hood platform, rolling out hyperlocalised creative across hundreds of Australian suburbs and regions.
The campaign continues the platform’s focus on supporting local restaurants and driving orders.
At the centre is An Ode to Local, creative work featuring hip hop act Bliss n Eso. The campaign uses AI creative and distribution tools to adapt lyrics, visuals and executions to spotlight restaurants in specific communities.
Thinkerbell, working with Heckler and Made Promptly, developed a custom toolkit combining live-action filmmaking, VFX and AI models. The system scaled one idea into hundreds of executions, featuring almost 500 restaurants. Participating venues receive advertising exposure equivalent to thousands of dollars in media value.
The campaign spans film, audio, out-of-home and digital, and the agency noted that each medium posed unique challenges.
For film, live action food shots were combined with AI trained models that regenerated everyday shopfront photos into cinematic motion. Each neighbourhood saw its own restaurant storefront elevated to big screen quality.
Bliss n Eso recorded a library of verses and personally trained a voice model for the radio and audio element of the campaign. This allowed new shout outs to be generated instantly for any suburb or restaurant while maintaining their distinctive tone, rhythm and energy. This was not generic voice cloning but a purpose built, artist approved system.
Restaurant photography was reimagined with premium food styling and paired with suburb specific headlines for Out of Home ads. Each regenerated image will be available to owners as professional photography, creating assets they can continue to use ongoing, while avoiding the high costs associated with shooting them.
The campaign, powered by Innovid’s dynamic ad-serving tech, powered more than 250 audio and 25 video assets, tailored at postcode level and adapted in real time with geo and first-party data.
“We have worked with several emerging technologies in the AI space to move beyond generic outputs into contextually relevant creative,” Sesh Moodley, Executive Creative Tinker at Thinkerbell, said.
“For us that meant using AI not as a shortcut, but as a collaborator that could help us handcraft thousands of local stories. Every suburb, every restaurant, every shout-out feels unique because it was designed to.
“Importantly, this campaign was not led by machines. It was led by creativity. Mushroom Records and Bliss n Eso were the perfect partners to prove that when you fuse artistry and technology, you do not diminish creativity, you amplify it.”
Simon Cheng, Menulog Marketing Director (CMO), said: “As the OG on-demand delivery platform, we have been part of local communities for almost 20 years, working with small and independent restaurants across Australia.
“While we deeply care about championing restaurant partners, it’s always been a challenge to feature them at a larger scale.
“This campaign enables us to feature hundreds of hyperlocal ads that do not just celebrate our food heroes but actively dive odes and value back into their businesses. It is proof that creativity and technology can come together to do something extraordinary, fresh and fun for the communities we serve.”
Kiely Decker, Head Thinker at Thinkerbell, said: “Our ambition was to weave hyperlocalisation into every execution, from audio shout-outs to shopfront visuals, without losing craft. That scale brought challenges in selecting the right routes, managing outputs and ensuring every suburb felt genuinely seen.
“Working iteratively with AI allowed us to refine until the craft matched the ambition. What I am most proud of is how the strategic thinking stretched from the big creative platform down to the smallest local detail, with localisation matching the media — hyperlocal for digital audio and out of home, broader for terrestrial TV.”
Menulog noted that the campaign is the world’s first scalable local campaign that maintains a handcrafted feel.
Credits
Client: Menulog
Creative agency: Thinkerbell
Media: UM
Production: Heckler
Production: Made Promptly
Sound: Heckler Sound
Music: Bliss n Eso & Mushroom Group