Menulog champions loads of local restaurants in hyperlocalised new phase of ‘What’s Good in Your Hood’ campaign via Thinkerbell

Australian-born on-demand delivery platform, Menulog has launched the next phase of its ‘What’s Good in Your Hood’ platform via Thinkerbell, localising the creative idea to hundreds of suburbs and regions across Australia. The campaign supports Menulog’s strategic focus on backing local food heroes and driving orders to local restaurants.

 

At the centre of the project sits An Ode to Local, creative work featuring Aussie hip hop legends Bliss n Eso. The hyperlocalised campaign combines several AI creative and distribution tools to deliver tailored versions of the idea, showcasing local restaurants with lyrics and executions adapted to communities across the country.

Thinkerbell, working with Heckler and Made Promptly, engineered a custom creative toolkit that fuses live action filmmaking, traditional VFX and AI models. This system allowed one campaign to scale into hundreds of unique ads, without sacrificing craft or storytelling.

The result is the world’s first scalable local campaign that feels handcrafted. Almost 500 restaurants feature across hundreds of unique executions. Some of these participating businesses receive the equivalent of thousands of dollars in advertising value, designed to lift orders and deliver support where it is needed most.

Each medium posed unique challenges:

Film (Digital and Terrestrial)
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.

Radio and Audio
Bliss n Eso recorded a library of verses and personally trained a voice model. 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.

Out of Home
Restaurant photography was reimagined with premium food styling and paired with suburb specific headlines. 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.

Digital Media
Powered by Innovid’s dynamic ad-serving tech, the campaign delivered more than 250 audio and 25 video assets with postcode-level precision. Messaging adapted in real time using geo and first-party data, enabling hyperlocal personalisation across programmatic video, digital audio, YouTube and paid social.

Says Sesh Moodley, Executive Creative Tinker at Thinkerbell: “We have worked with several emerging technologies in the AI space to move beyond generic outputs into contextually relevant creative. 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.”

Says Simon Cheng, Menulog Marketing Director (CMO): “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.”

Says Kiely Decker, Head Thinker at Thinkerbell: “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.”

The project is among the first large mainstream uses of AI in the Australian advertising market, and the first to fuse creative and media in such an integrated manner.

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Client: Menulog
Creative agency: Thinkerbell
Media: UM
Production: Heckler
Production: Made Promptly
Sound: Heckler Sound
Music: Bliss n Eso & Mushroom Group