Cat food brand Whiskas has recently launched a new campaign in partnership with Clemenger BBDO and EssenceMediacom with a goal to transform ‘cat haters’ into ‘cat lovers’.
It serves to highlight the major issue of Australian shelters overflowing with pets. Specifically, more than 39,000 cats are in need of homes, and Whiskas wants to tackle the crisis by addressing ‘cat sceptics’ and not the already very strong advocacy of cat lovers in Australia.
Whiskas Brand Director, Camille Shepherd gave insight into why Whiskas wanted to address the cat crisis: “We believe in a world where everyone gets to experience the joy of it (owning a cat) , having more cats in more homes equals more purrs.”
Research commissioned by Whiskas has revealed that countless Aussies are overlooking the perfect pet without even realising it. The study shows that one in six Australians (15 per cent) admit to disliking or even outright hating cats. But 74 per cent of them have never owned or lived with a cat. An overwhelming 91 per cent of Australians agree that cats deserve a loving home, yet 62 per cent say they have no plans to foster or adopt in the next 12 months.
Another strong factor to why ‘The Cat Conversion System’ was created to target sceptics was because Whiskas deemed the market of feline fans flooded.
In fact, Whiskas revealed to B&T that 30 per cent of cat owners own more than one.
In an attempt to sway the perception, Whiskas wanted to get in touch with the sceptics by utilising a first-of-its-kind TikTok dislike algorithm. This was achieved through posting “cute cat videos” on TikTok, and how quickly people swiped past it deemed if they would be suitable for the adoption experiment or not. Once a person was a match, Whiskas would get in touch and try and get them to reach out to participating shelters for the two week experiment.
“The quicker you went past our videos, the more we knew you were actually someone who we really wanted to talk to”, said Rob Boddington, senior creative at Clemenger BBDO. “We then re-targeted those people with Australia’s influencer demographic by getting them to talk through the camera and call people out.”
Shepherd built on the overarching ideology of cat misconception: “We knew there was this misconception or perception or misunderstanding of cats, and we wanted to get those people closer to cats.”
“It sparked into, how do you know you’re not a cat lover if you’ve never lived with a cat”, she exclaimed!
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Once attracted, ‘haters’ were encouraged to reach out to one of the partner shelters and foster a cat for two weeks. This proposed a new problem of showing a general concern for the cats by informing the adoptees and making sure the cats were being properly cared for the entirety of the two weeks.
“We provided a digital toolkit that really armed those people that were interested in going into that journey with all the information that they needed and more to be a good cat parent”, said Shepherd.
“In addition to that, we provided food as well for that time period, and the toolkit answered, how do I feed my cat? What does that look like? That ensured at its heart, cats were well cared for and looked after during the entire process.”
The end result of the two week campaign was hopefully the cat had found a permanent home, with a newly converted ‘cat lover’!
The campaign generated an earned reach of 45 million people. Impressively, Whiskas can reveal that this led to 115,000 Australians being open to fostering or adopting after seeing the campaign.
Whiskas added there were three times more cat adoption inquiries at participating shelters as well, which has contributed to reducing the number of homeless cats in Australia.
Boddington delved into the perception change he witnessed. “When I first interviewed a wonderful truck driver, he explained the thing I’m scared most about is that I might like it, and sure enough he ended up loving it.”
“Just the staunch refusal into admitting that he liked it whilst he was scratching this Little Kittens face. This was great to put out there because it helped people see the scepticism they had in themselves.”
Following the success in Australia the campaign is looking at going overseas. “We’ve got plans for the UK, India. Interestingly, India is quite interested, which I think could be a really fascinating market”, said Shepherd.
