THE KITTY

TitleTHE KITTY
BrandSAVE WILD TIGERS
Product / ServiceWILDLIFE CONSERVATION
CategoryC01. Health & Wellness: Animal Health
EntrantJOY Sydney, AUSTRALIA
Idea Creation JOY Sydney, AUSTRALIA

Credits

Name Company Position
Christian Tough Joy Copywriter
Effie Kacopieros Joy Art Director
Alastair Flack Joy Art Director
Steve Back Joy Executive Creative Director
Louis Hu Joy Designer
Erin Parry Joy Account Director

The Campaign

The insight: Our attention doesn’t lie with what is truly important- the survival of endangered species like Tigers are overlooked for the mundane. For instance, collectively we watch hundreds of millions of cat videos each month on YouTube. Imagine if we could harness and re-direct this attention for a good cause. The idea: Non-profit organisation Save Wild Tigers, wanted to put all of those kittens to a good use: so we created “The Kitty” – a YouTube channel where you can watch cat videos… to save a tiger. Each time someone views a cat video on the Kitty, a small amount of money raised from advertising goes into a fund for Tiger conservation- and it all adds up. If all of the cat video views on YouTube so far had raised money for conservation, this would equate to more than $350USD million—enough to save Tigers from extinction.

Creative Execution

We launched in the week lead up to World Tiger Day to capitalize off the biggest PR day of the year for this issue. We used our own social media channels to recruit a global online community of cat-lovers to help us… it turns out there is quite a lot of them, too. With no marketing spend, we were restricted when creating content ourselves, instead we empowered this global, online community to create the content for us; we built The Kitty and handed it over to them. Anyone from anywhere could upload their own cat videos and share them on social media to generate maximum views, because the more views meant more money in The Kitty. We gave anyone with a cat and a smartphone their own platform to collectively do something to benefit the planet.

Since it’s launch in June 2016, ahead of World Tiger Day, this grass-roots online campaign has generated critical awareness and action: • over a quarter of a million minutes of cat videos watched on The Kitty and counting • over a thousand channel subscribers who are active content creators and sharers • hundreds of cat videos created and uploaded • we successfully started an ongoing revenue stream for wild Tiger conservation • In only a month, with no spend on media, we attracted audiences who watched, uploaded and shared video content from The Kitty from 211 countries • We reached a new and difficult-to-engage audience for Save Wild Tigers, Gen Y, with 80% of our viewership being made up of P18-34 • We generated a global PR campaign and were covered by popular websites such as Fast Company, Contagious and other major online News mastheads

We researched Gen Y and discovered that they don’t give money to charity, however they are more “generous” than any other generation. Instead, they choose to donate to causes they think worthy with their time, not their money. So we evolved Save Wild Tigers' model to raise awareness & funds for big cat conservation without asking people for their credit card details. We tapped into an endless yet invisible, online economy of cat videos, and by simply asking our audience to watch or share a few YouTube clips- or if they felt even more passionate about our cause, upload their own cat videos to The Kitty- which could be done easily through our website. We innovated the charity’s currency of choice, cash- into cat videos. We also created the first YouTube channel to specifically harness the phenomenon of cats to have a greater impact beyond a few LOLs.

Links

Website URL   |   Supporting Webpage