Whiskas

Information about the company

Whiskas is a brand of cat food sold internationally. It is owned by the American company Mars, Incorporated. It is available either as meat-like pieces in cans, pouches, or dry biscuits. Most packaging has a recognisable purple color and a stylized silhouette of a cat's head.

Commercial approach

In 2016, there were more than 2B views of cat-related content on YouTube.1 And Google sees more than 30M cat-related searches each month.2 That’s a lot of cats.

As the biggest kitten and senior cat food brand in the world, WHISKAS®understands the importance of being there for these web and cat-obsessed owners throughout their cat’s life. WHISKAS® also knows that kittenhood is the key to point-of-entry marketing and a significant business opportunity, so it set a lofty goal: Become the key reference for kitten care online.

Google Ads success story

WHISKAS® wanted to reach kitten owners with relevant content, so it asked its creative agency, AMV BBDO, to spearhead a collaboration with Mediacom, Google ZOO, and Google’s Creative Agency Team. The teams worked together to identify the most common search terms around kitten care, from entertaining terms like “lolcats” to serious questions like, “When do I get my kitten neutered?” Based on query patterns, “We stepped back and looked at all these search terms and found the framework to glue them all together,” said Mike Crowe, creative partner at AMV BBDO.

The result was Kitten Kollege, a YouTube series that juxtaposes the earnestness of promotional university films with charming kitten chaos. The videos educate viewers in the cutest possible way, with a charming class of kittens and their tutors who answer commonly asked questions about the moments that matter in the first year. “We wanted to not only reach their brains, but reach their hearts,” said Cecile Angrand, global brand director at WHISKAS®.

The campaign lived on YouTube, where the team used a hero/hub/help framework to create and distribute the ads. The first three Kitten Kollege episodes ran as “hero” content, leveraging non-skippable pre-rolls to reach a broad audience in a cost-efficient way. The rest of the episodes were promoted as “hub” content on TrueView, YouTube’s skippable ads format. To meet users in their moments of need, educational “help” content was designed to be discovered when people searched for kitten care terms on both Google and YouTube.

Results

- 39M total views
- +47% increase in ad recall