The Campaign

To prove that nobody understands cats as well as Whiskas, Australia's biggest cat food brand moved beyond mealtime and made it's first foray into furniture design. Whiskas Cat Hacks gave humans simple and entertaining instructions to modify accessible flat-pack furniture to make it more feline friendly. Off-the-wall ideas like coffee table cat hammocks and meal time clock feeders turned every day items into insightful objects that stimulated cats' natural curiosity.

Creative Execution

We launched a series of micro-films that took advantage of the pop-cultural obsession with "hacks", ways to improve your lifestyle with minimal effort. The videos taught cat-owners how they could easily modify their existing (or easily accessible) furniture to better cater to cats' curious characters. The highly stylised instructional films gave viewers all of the information they needed, and all of the cuteness they wanted, in less than the time it would take to watch a conventional commercial. 6 micro-films (sub-15") launched the campaign, appearing on Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram. The hacked furniture that appeared in the films was donated to local catteries which helped to spread the word through influencers and following the launch, our audience continued the conversation uploading images of their finished hacks along with new ideas on our social channels.

In 2 weeks: +870,000 views +7 million impressions 5 minute feature on national TV

¼ of Australia households are home to cats. Despite that impressive number, almost 100% of those houses are furnished exclusively for humans. Our social listening told us that this wasn’t indicative of how cat owners viewed their relationship to their four-legged friends, they saw them more as equals, but they were sick and tired of their furniture suffering at the paws of their housemates. To turn that around, we hit social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, because our audience was made up of two overlapping interest groups with a voracious appetite for online content. Cat lovers and DIY'ers - both love online video for different reasons: entertainment and education. We combined the two with bite-sized films that were highly rewarding on both fronts. Facebook and YouTube built awareness with hero films, Instagram carried visually engaging reminders with micro-films, gifs, cinemagraphs and Boomerangs.