Pet owners, or pet parents as they seem to prefer to be called nowadays, are fussy about the consumption habits of their pets. Probably fussier than the pets themselves.
That worry about the quality, provenance and health benefits of pet food poses a significant challenge for incumbent pet food brands. Rising up to fill the gap are brands offering pet parents “freshly cooked food” for their perfect pooches—though those same pets would likely go hammer and tongs on a discarded and potentially on-the-turn chicken leg.
As with the current rise of alternative diets among humans such as the carnivore and ketogenic diets or the removal of seed oils, there is a vast amount tenuous or even spurious information regarding pet foods.
It’s a problem that Mars Petcare was feeling quite acutely. With that context in mind, it turned to News Corp to set the record straight and its buyers from barking up the wrong tree.
“The amount of information and types of food that you can feed your animals is quite mind blowing,” News Corp’s Natalie Grabbe, general manager of advertising sales in Victoria told B&T.
Grabbe herself owns two cats and a Della, a French bulldog.
“Mars was trying to work with a trusted partner. [News Corp’s mastheads] were able to provide credibility. That’s why we went down the path of building out this content hub through News.com.au and making it very accessible for pet parents to get the information they were looking for,” she added.
To help correct the record, News and Mars created Pet Sense. Its content was designed to engage audiences with relevant and engaging information on pet nutrition served in native articles, videos featuring pet experts and even podcasts. This content was then amplified further with targeted social media posts and high impact advertising. All of it was driven by user targeting on News’ Intent Connect platform.
But Grabbe was keen to point out that the content that formed the core of this campaign, it was not considered as a nice-to-have or a makeweight. The tail was certainly not wagging the dog, here.
“The content resonated with our audiences because it was driven by experts in this space and research-based nutritional tips and tricks. The storytelling itself was really about developing a connection with the audience. It was front-and-centre of the campaign,” said Grabbe.
“The targeting was identifying current pet owners, the sort of food they bought and then utilising Intent Connect to really establish how to reach those audiences… It was a combination of factual, evidence-based information and deep connection through more emotive storytelling.”
The strategy produced strong results. According Kantar benchmarks, Pet Sense was was 83 per cent more likeable than the average pet care content, 84 per cent more relevant to pet owners and it was 78 per cent more effective at differentiating Mars Pet Care’s dry food. The content also reached more than 3 million people.
“But beyond the reach, it was the engagement that really mattered to us,” said Jules Lau, brand and content experience lead at Mars Pet Nutrition ANZ.
Grabbe added that the partnership is expected to be an ongoing one and the respective teams are already in discussions about evolving the partnership into some meatier—though without it getting long in the tooth. The work was also booked through Mars’ media agency EssenceMediacom.
Know your client & your market
Central to the success of this campaign, Grabbe believes, is how close News Corp is to its clients. Grabbe herself joined News Corp in May 2023 as its Victorian head of agency, and stepped into her current role in July last year—expanding her remit from looking after agencies to focusing on all of News’ clients.
Prior to News, she had served as chief sales officer for Swift Networks, Melbourne head of digital for Nine and head of Victorian sales for Yahoo7.
“I feel really fortunate to work with such a talented team. It’s important for any business, and certainly in media, to build relationships with your clients,” she explained.
“I’m a really firm believer that you need to spend time with your clients… becoming very close with those clients and truly understanding their business challenges has to be a priority for anyone working in these kind of roles.”
Getting to that point, Grabbe said, was all about asking the right questions. It’s only once you start asking the right questions about brands and their business challenges that clients return.
“Clients in my experience work with publishers or media owners who have in the past or who are currently able to deliver those kinds of results. That’s what we’ve delivered with the Mars case study,” she said.
The results are changing, however. While once it might have been simply about putting meat on the table (or in the dog bowl, in this instance) Grabbe said that clients are looking for trusted media partners. It’s something that News has been very keen to acknowledge over the past year, particularly as social platforms seem to be losing the trust of audiences.
“The scale of our audience is significant through the varying brands we represent,” she said.
“The second part is relevance and the way in which you deliver relevance to that audience and being able to understand how to reach those audiences at the right moment. That’s where Intent Connect comes in for us. It’s making sure that we are providing relevance to our brands to reach the right audiences at the right time and in the right place.”
That may sound obvious, perhaps even banal. But at a time when audiences are proving harder to reach, and even harder to convince, there’s certainly merit in returning to the basics of good media sales practices. And returning to the basics of trusted media.
