Menulog ads have a history of calling in heavy music hitters.
From Snoop Dogg turning “Did Somebody Say” into a viral jingle to Katy Perry and Wu-Tang Clan dropping their own spins, the food delivery platform has never shied away from big-ticket names. But its latest campaign, ‘What’s Good in Your Hood’, brings things closer to home with Aussie rap veterans Bliss n Eso, who managed to turn their food freestyles into an ARIA nomination.
Asked who had the better bars, Eso doesn’t hesitate. “I would say us… we’ve got the better bars,” he claims, taking a friendly swipe at their famous predecessors.
On paper, the idea sounds left-field: take one of Australia’s most established rap groups and have them rhyme about pad thai and pizza. In practice, however, it became one of the most innovative campaigns in Australian advertising, melding live-action film, artificial intelligence, and Bliss n Eso’s trademark wordplay to create hundreds of hyper-local ads spotlighting small restaurants across the country.
“It was kind of our ballpark,” Jonathan Notley, aka MC Bliss, tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “We literally freestyle about food for fun in the tour van when we’re on the road. So when this came across our desk, we just jumped at it. It’s what we do anyway.”
The partnership began with a serendipitous connection. Bliss had a university friend who ended up working with Thinkerbell, the agency behind the campaign. When Menulog briefed them on a new hyperlocal idea, she put the duo forward.
“They sent through the brief, and we just thought, ‘This is perfect,’” Bliss recalls. “We were already vibing with the local angle, the Australiana flavour. We knew we could help elevate that.”
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What followed was a writing sprint unlike anything the group had done in years. “We sat down to write some ideas and ended up with a two-and-a-half-minute song — just all bars,” Bliss reveals. “We went absolutely ballistic. We had so many ideas.”
Eso remembers it as a kind of throwback. “Whenever we’re in the studio, it feels like we time travel back to when we were sixteen, just falling in love with words and rhymes again. This gave us new words to play with, and it was so much fun.”
When they presented their early draft, the reaction from the ad agency was immediate. “We played it over Zoom and told them, ‘Turn your cameras on, we want to see your faces.’ The whole office was jumping around. They didn’t expect us to go that hard.”
Behind the scenes, ‘What’s Good in Your Hood’ was a technical and creative feat. Thinkerbell, alongside Heckler and Made Promptly, engineered a system that fused live action filmmaking with AI models. The toolkit allowed the campaign to scale into nearly 500 unique ads, each tailored to a different suburb or restaurant.
On screen, everyday restaurant shopfronts were regenerated into cinematic, big-screen quality sequences. On the airwaves, Bliss n Eso recorded an extensive library of verses and even trained a custom voice model, enabling new suburb shout-outs to be generated instantly while still carrying their exact cadence and energy.
Out-of-home advertising leaned into restaurant photography, giving small business owners the kind of polished, professionally styled images that would normally be out of reach — and then handing those assets back to them for ongoing use. And in the digital sphere, postcode-level precision meant more than 250 audio and 25 video ads could be served dynamically across YouTube, streaming platforms, and social media, ensuring hyperlocal targeting on a national scale.
“It’s proof that creativity and technology can come together to do something extraordinary,” said Menulog’s Marketing Director, Simon Cheng.
For Bliss n Eso, the use of artificial intelligence wasn’t about replacing creativity — it was about amplifying it.
“We wanted to do things like breathing fire after eating hot chilli pad thai,” Bliss says. “AI let us take those wild ideas and actually bring them to life. It gave us a whole new palette of creativity.”
Eso stresses they were deeply involved in the process. “We were very hands-on. If something didn’t look right, if it wasn’t a good representation of us, it went back to the chopping board. That control was important, especially when you’re dealing with AI.”
And that fish? “The fish was good to go from the start,” Eso laughs.
The ad shoot came at a hectic time for the group, in the middle of their ‘Party on the Moon’ tour.
“Early mornings and late nights — we’d be in the middle of a forest in a tunnel with a camera crew at 3am, then on stage the next day,” Eso says. “It was non-stop.”
But for the duo, the campaign slotted neatly into their creative schedule. Bliss explains: “We dropped The Sun: Light Side in March, and The Sun: Dark Side is out at the end of this month. Having this campaign drop in between just meant more eyeballs on us in different ways, which is never a bad thing.”
At its heart, the ‘What’s Good in Your Hood’ campaign wasn’t just about Bliss n Eso or Menulog — it was about championing small restaurants. Almost 500 businesses across Australia were featured, with many receiving the equivalent of thousands of dollars in advertising value.
That personal connection resonated with the rappers, too. Bliss shouts out his local coffee joint, Sloppy Teas, whose owners recently quoted the campaign slogan back at him in the store. On tour, they even began filming their own skits with local restaurants, from Mr. Rice in Newcastle to small cafés in Hobart and Mackay. “It’s been good to tap into the local scene like that,” Bliss says. “It definitely ties into our whole thing about community and connection.”
Not everyone has loved the campaign, though. Scroll through social media and you’ll find as many skeptics as fans. But Bliss n Eso are unbothered.
“I think the people who hate it just wish they were in the ad,” Eso shrugs. “They want the part.”
For a group that once freestyled about food for fun, the recognition feels surreal. “It’s just dope to have something different out there, some fun content, while we’re in album cycle,” Bliss says.
And now, with an ARIA nomination for Best Use of an Australian Recording in an Advertisement in their pocket, the question of whether rhyming about pizza and pad thai can count as art has already been answered.
“It’s just another way of connecting with people,” Bliss says. “That’s always been our thing. Whether it’s in a club, on a record, or in a Menulog ad; if people are vibing, we’re happy.”
Read Bliss n Eso’s recent Rolling Stone AU/NZ interview here.
