Celebrating National Pet Month with These 5 Campaigns
The English philosopher Bernard Williams is said to have remarked that "there is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face." The observation pithily captures how much pets contribute to our flourishing as humans.
It's fitting, then, that, in the U.S., we devote May to celebrating our furry confreres with National Pet Month, which makes it the perfect time to highlight ANA case studies that showcase excellence in innovative approaches to the marketing of pet brands.
Summaries follow below, with the full case studies accessible through the embedded links.
Pedigree SelfieSTIX
To demonstrate the irresistibility of Pedigree DENTASTIX, MARS NZ created SelfieSTIX, a specially designed phone accessory that attaches DENTASTIX to your phone, so you can capture the perfect dog selfie.
Puppo's Personalized Pet Outreach
Puppo created unique ads and meals for the 100,729 dogs registered in NYC. Each unique ad featured a QR code that drove dog owners to a personalized shopping experienced tailored to their dog.
Catflix
To promote new flavors of its cat food, Champion Cat created a content series that parodied existing intellectual properties such as Transformers with videos such as Catformers.
Fresh Step Clean Paws
In a cat litter market plagued by overpromises, Fresh Step had to persuade skeptical pet parents that its new product innovation, Clean Paws, was the first low-tracking litter solution that actually worked. The solution? Photograph Fresh Step cats from underneath to spotlight their spick-and-span paws, a novel approach to the product's advertising that helped it become the No. 1 new product in the cat litter category.
It turns out cat lovers can't get enough of cats' little jellybean paws, and people became obsessed with images of cats photographed underneath a glass surface — in fact, there was already a subreddit devoted to "catsonglass"!
The Shelter Pet Project Campaign
The Shelter Pet Project is the result of a collaborative effort between two leading animal welfare groups, the Humane Society of the United States and Maddie's Fund, and the leading producer of public service advertising (PSA) campaigns, The Ad Council.
According to the organizations, 2.4 million healthy and treatable pets are currently in shelters. The goal of the "The Shelter Pet Project" campaign is to help find a home for these pets. The Shelter Pet Project encourages millions of pet lovers to make shelters the chosen method to adopt companion animals.
Check out more case studies in ANA's library here.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
Morgan Strawn is a senior manager of editorial and content development at ANA.
