Asia-Pacific Power List 2022: Andy Morley, Uber & Uber Eats

Andy Morley

Director of marketing
Uber & Uber Eats, ANZ
Australia
New member  

Andy Morley says he was attracted to marketing for the entrepreneurial opportunities, and has certainly shown the drive of an entrepreneur in his career to date. Beginning as a sales manager at Campbell Arnott's, he then switched to Diageo to work on Johnnie Walker for five years before arriving at Uber in 2016, where he's since been promoted twice to his current role.

Morley has continued to display considerable drive while at Uber. In fact, the company didn’t even have a marketing organisation when he first joined the team but Morley has since created a comprehensive marketing function. 

However, since taking the reins in 2019, it's not always been a smooth ride. Most recently Uber faced regulatory scrutiny in Australia and the company lost quite a few people at the start of the pandemic amid global layoffs, but Morley and his team have weathered the storms and have continued to produce daring and provocative work. There was the slightly weird, albeit fun, Uber Eats 'Choose your own' Australian Open campaign that ran earlier in the year, which followed the TV-hacking (and Cannes Lions-winning) 'Ambush' campaign of 2019.

Partnerships have also been a key focus of Morley's marketing strategy at Uber. Recently, Uber has teamed up with Optus, Dettol and Spotify on a series of successful co-marketing efforts, with Morley taking the view that partnerships work best when they are focused on solving a consumer problem. 

It's clearly working well. Uber and Uber Eats created an estimated $10.4 billion in economic value for the Australian economy and produced $6.6 billion in consumer surplus in 2021, equivalent to 0.35% of its GDP.

Going forward, Morley is a firm believer that the role marketing should play at Uber is to be customer custodians—to be the driver of consumer insights that fuel where the brand needs to go next, and what the barriers are going to be, and understanding what marketing really is effective and what isn’t. For Morley, that's doing bold work that cuts through rather than safe stuff that feels good in strategy rooms—and so far it's clearly paying off.