The Campaign

We gave a voice to the harshest critics around that our target audience would trust, their cats, and allowed them to review Friskies on social media through licks, not likes. We did this by transforming every cat owner’s phone touch screen into a lick detector that read the subtle details of a cat’s tongue.

Creative Execution

For the first time we gave cats a voice so they could tell their owners how much they like Friskies. Developing a new way to interpret the capacitive data from touchscreens, we turned every smartphone into a lick detector, turning licks into likes. We launched Cat Critic with free trial packs at pet stores, and cat shows around the country, all people had to do then was place Friskies on their Smartphone with our html5 site open and let their cat lick it clean. The more cats licked their phone clean, the more positive their review of Friskies on social media. For the first time, Cats became influencers, talking about Friskies in a new way and sharing to wider audiences.

Results

• Friskies increased volume share by 1.8% • This is an additional 133 tonnes of Friskies • Or more than eight shipping containers of Friskies • Or 62,437 additional customers

Where cat owners have previously been told what their cat would enjoy, we decided to give out free trial packs of our product directly to customers and let their cats be the judge. Using the Cat Critic, owners could find out what their own cat thought of Friskies through a simple one to one interaction using their mobile. This gave owners the most personal and trusted recommendation for their brand possible, a positive review from their cat.

The Friskies consumer believe they have an intuitive connection with their cats. More importantly, they spend most of their time on social media and use their mobile more than any other audience. With this in mind, we focussed on social media and mobile interactions as a touchpoint with our audience, to prove to them that their cat loves Friskies.