Mars attacks

Whiskas is still the market leader, but as in beer, so with pet food: The ‘craft’ smaller brands have been nibbling away at market share, especially with younger pet owners, kicking off a showdown in the multibillion dollar industry. Camille Shepherd, Mars Petcare Portfolio Marketing Director, needed to do something about it. Covid lockdowns provided the opportunity – ecom was booming and everyone and their cat were at home, bored. The answer was to use Amazon’s delivery boxes as media in their own right, link them back to its branded DTC store on Amazon.com – and tap the ecom giant’s ad network to drive home the message to cat owners under 45, which apparently make up 35 per cent of Amazon’s Australian shoppers, per Roy Morgan.

The idea delivered. Sales soared 70 per cent during the campaign – and stayed high for the rest of 2021. Branded search similarly flipped from declines to growth and overall ROI was £3.79, despite requiring some significant costs: having to design delivery boxes that matched Amazon’s requirements that could be turned into playgrounds for cats – a cat castle, cat office and a cat rollercoaster.

Basic instincts

The pet care category is outpacing most of FMCG – “well into double digit growth” per Shepherd. Part of that is the Covid effect, but it runs deeper: People are having children later. “So ‘fur babies’ play that critical role and people are doing that earlier and spending more on them,” says Shepherd. Hence Mars Petcare referring to its customers as “pet parents”.

The challenge is that upstart brands are filling their boots, often mirroring human food trends around natural ingredients. That has created a relevancy issue for Whiskas in the biggest growth market. Hence trying something different – leading EssenceMediacom to approach Amazon.

“The brief to Amazon Ads was that we wanted to go beyond ads,” says Chief Strategy Officer, Sophie Price. “We wanted to create an idea with cultural relevance.”

That’s not always been easy within ecom, traditionally seen as a “functional space,” says Price. But using the boxes – during Covid, when everyone was receiving more of them than ever – were the “aha moment”.

“What we saw were that cats were mastering turning those boxes into a world of play. It taps into their natural instincts, which is really important to Whiskers as a brand,” says Price. “Cats love boxes.”

Box clever

The approach required a partnership with Amazon – which owns the boxes and therefore the “brand experience” across fulfilment and execution, says Price, with Amazon’s Brand Innovation Lab ultimately delivering the goods.

Getting there was no mean feat. But it serves as an illustration of how retailer media – predicted by many to grow massively in Australia over the next few years – can go beyond serving ads to customers close to point of purchase and closing the loop on attribution.

EssenceMediacom Client Managing Partner, Michelle O’Brien, suggests it’s an example of retailer media players operating across the funnel, rather than purely at the lower end.

“At Mars, we talk in funnels, where there's reach, relevance and reaction. And certainly the box was at the center of the reach component. It had some scale, but from a relevancy perspective, there was also a QR code that drove people to a branded store page, which housed instructions on how to construct the box, as well as some user generated initiatives – social sharing etcetera. Plus, there were some of the usual [paid media] suspects in video inventory and display [across the Amazon network] as well as some retargeting,” she says. “So it was the full system.”

Sales catnip

Mars Petcare’s Camille Shepherd said the Whiskas wanted both “results overnight and longevity,” and got both.

“In addition to the 70 per cent uplift that we saw on sales during the campaign, the two things that really excited us were the results post the campaign period – the uplift was sustained,” she says, while branded search results, previously “on a downward trajectory, rode a tailwind.  During the campaign, branded search results doubled, “and post campaign they were trending upwards.” Per a post-campaign survey, brand consideration increased five per cent.

Would the campaign have worked without the boxes? “No,” says Shepherd. EssenceMediacom’s Price agrees. “Otherwise it just becomes an ad network buy. We’d have seen something, because there is reach and effectiveness there. But don’t think we’d have seen that scale of uplift.”

Meaty overhaul

“We are facing down the barrel of a huge year on Whiskas, and our pet parents and consumers will definitely notice that step change,” says Camille Shepherd. “It's going to be one of the biggest refreshes in the brand’s history.”

The overhaul will wrap in everything from recipe refreshes (probably a fair assumption natural ingredients will feature somewhere), to packaging reductions and sustainability, per Shepherd, as it bids to take the fight to the craft cat food purveyors wooing Gen X to Gen Z. Plus there’s a new creative comms platform, ‘Purr more’, which sounds like it will make cats do what it say on the tin.

Retailer roadmap 

EssenceMediacom plans to use the Whiskas campaign to show both retailers and brands what good looks like – and how to actually play across the funnel, instead of talking about it.

“My big learning is that it's really difficult to break through in ecom. It's very placid, it’s seen as quite a transactional and functional media environment. It’s incredibly important but it's also quite hard to breakthrough in an emotional way,” says EssenceMediacom’s Sophie Price.

“This idea has shown us that you can create an emotional connection and a meaningful ecom interaction if you push those boundaries. Moving forward, that is what we will push our partners to do.”

Michelle O’Neill seconds that view. For retailer media to really work, she says, “all the parts need to speak together and all the parts need to drive a certain outcome”.