True CATectives

One in three cats goes missing, and fewer than half return home. 36% of cat owners have personally experienced losing a pet, 99% fear it could happen. Yet cat-food brands have avoided the issue due to low recovery rates and the difficulty of finding missing cats.

WHISKAS® became the first cat-food brand to help find lost cats on a long-term basis. We launched @GdeKotBot, an AI-powered crowdsourced search platform where people upload photos of cats spotted on the streets. AI compares them with a database of missing pets and alerts owners to potential matches.

The key to success: the more people joined the search, the more cats could be saved. Ahead of winter, we urgently needed to grow our community without a budget for social campaigns.

To create a powerful media story around our platform, we decided to recruit cats to search for other cats.

Using platform data, we identified neighborhoods with the most missing cats and recruited local owners who let their cats roam outdoors. We hired their cats as TRUE CATectives. (Owners’ dream come true: cats earned their own food.)

Equipped with tiny cameras, our CATectives explored places humans couldn’t easily reach. AI analyzed their footage and checked spotted cats against our missing-pet database. Meanwhile, owners could track their cats’ adventures without the usual worries.

We knew our CATectives wouldn’t find many missing cats. But we were sure they’d become great digital content creators and generate a powerful PR story that would inspire more people to join the search.

With a tiny project budget of under $5K and zero PR spend, TRUE CATectives made headlines in 600+ media, telegram channels, and blogs worldwide (34+mln impressions), attracted thousands of new users (cat owners), and helped convert them into Whiskas buyers. +7.3% Sales Uplift, +1.5pp market share.