For many beloved Australian brands, longevity doesn’t always guarantee loyalty. While the business may have been around for decades, this endurance often comes with a pre-established reputation and audience base. The challenge then is, how do you reach new customers?
Whiskas, the #1 cat food brand in Australia, and their agency MediaCom collaborated with Amazon Ads to reach a new audience, using Amazon Ads to reach the right shoppers in the right moments via an award-winning campaign that captured their hearts and increased sales, both online and in-store.
Having been in the Australian pet food industry since 1958, Whiskas was keen to reshape the brand’s nostalgic reputation and reach a new audience: the digitally-savvy cat lover. Amazon Ads insights showed a significant number of Amazon.au shoppers were also cat lovers, and were increasingly shopping for pet food in the Amazon store.
To help revitalise Whiskas for a new generation, the business worked with Amazon Ads on an innovative #catsinboxes campaign – a promotion that aimed to connect with the social media-led shopper/cat lover, keen to entertain their kitty and share their exploits.
Connecting creative, commerce, and community
The campaign came at the height of Australia’s COVID-19 pandemic, with extended lock-downs forcing Aussies to spend more time at home (with their pets – nearly a quarter (24%) of all cats in Australia were adopted during the pandemic[1]) and dramatically boost their online retail use.
Whiskas and Amazon Ads, along with media agency MediaCom, utilised global events and key local insights and developed the first-ever Amazon Australian on-box advertising campaign, transforming its ordinary brown delivery boxes into kitty playgrounds. For two months, 250,000 large delivery boxes were transformed into either the Cat Castle, the Cat Office, or the Cat Roller, to the delight of cat owners nation-wide.
Shoppers were encouraged to share snaps of their cats playing inside the custom boxes via a QR code, which took them directly to a custom-designed Whiskas Amazon landing page. Dubbed the “Whiskas’ Kat Institute of Technology”, it was a place for customers to watch videos, browse products, share pictures, and enter the social media contest.
The campaign was a success for the company, growing sales by 70% on Amazon, with a 4.6% uptick offline, far exceeding the benchmark for average sales increase secured by pet food advertising campaigns of 1.8%. The campaign also achieved its aim of changing attitudes about the Whiskas brand – with the campaign driving a 5% increase in brand consideration and purchase intent.
The campaign has also since been recognised in the media and advertising industry, taking out two awards at the Festival of Media APAC Awards: ‘The Creative Use of Media’ award and ‘Best Campaign for A Specific Audience’. It was also nominated for a Cannes Lions Award.
The Amazon Ads opportunity
The collaboration with Whiskas is an example of how brands can use Amazon Ads to connect the right content with commerce to reach their audience and deliver meaningful business results.
For Whiskas, success lay in not only creating a highly engaging campaign, but determining its intended audience early, using Amazon Ads’ insights to reach and engage the right customer base.
Awareness was boosted by using Amazon Ads’ custom ad solution to create a Whiskas-dedicated landing page on Amazon.com.au, and by using social media to amplify content and further engage with consumers.
MediaCom Chief Strategy Officer Sophie Price said the agency chose to partner with Amazon Ads for its full-funnel marketing offering.
“Amazon offers the three magic ingredients for growth: reach, cultural relevance, and conversion opportunities,” she said.
“The Whiskas campaign success came down to using Amazon to earn attention in new ways, and how well we were able to reach our audience on the channel using Amazon Ads solutions. It was also about emotionally connecting with the audience – cat owners get absolute joy from seeing their cats behave as per their natural instincts, which made the boxes fun for the owner and the cat.”
Amazon Ads is committed to helping brands achieve tangible results by reaching relevant audiences with engaging content, and by providing them with a comprehensive, metrics-driven capture of their advertising investments.
[1] (Source Animal Medicines Australia, 2021).
