Show Us Your Drawers — an ambitious way to drive pet parents to try something new.

CLIENT Wellness Natural Pet Food
SCOPE Creative Direction / Film Production / Integrated Campaign

As a leader and household name in the US natural pet food market, Wellness approaches pet food and pet needs with an eye for innovation. Building on our long-standing partnership, ThreeSixtyEight pounced on the opportunity to help Wellness distinguish itself from competitive noise in the cat food space with an engaging integrated campaign.

THE CHALLENGE

Two words: market saturation. While Wellness once stood out as the leading natural pet food brand, they’ve now become less distinguishable. Newer brands have flooded the market with natural product lines and even older brands have created “natural” product extensions to compete. This saturation caused Wellness’s brand messages to blend into the background as every brand begins to sound the same. Same creative, same message, same look.

As Wellness revamped their line of wet cat foods, they couldn’t ignore a harsh reality – feeding cats is not a simple task. It requires lots of trial and error across many types of food. Marketing to those cat households proves even harder.

THE SOLUTION

We put our long-term relationship and trust as an innovation-led creative partner to the test when we pitched a creative direction that focused on an admissive, casual tone of voice. Did we mention it was slightly inappropriate? We wanted to focus on the real way people purchase, addressing the fact that consumers, especially cat owners, tend to change wet canned food regularly as their finicky furry friend decides the food they loved last week now tastes like garbage. And not the good type of garbage they dig into for a midnight snack.

To catch the eye of these consumers, we built a campaign on the ambitious catchphrase “show us your drawers” and crazy visuals like talking kitchen drawers to get people to stop scrolling. We focused this punchy, scrappy theme on awareness with complementary, but more direct ads directing conversion. We partnered with media company AgencyWithin to bring this campaign to the world.

Cats are picky and non-committal when it comes to their food, leaving cat owners with drawers and closets full of rejected food.

Would provocative copy and undie innuendos make you stop and look?

My life is a never-ending cycle of buying and returning cat food that my cat will eat for only a few weeks and then decides he hates that kind.

– Twitter Follower
Ambitious Direction

We took a risk when pitching this out-of-the-box concept. We leaned on years of trust-building with our partners at Wellness to encourage them to take a risk with this subtly inappropriate concept.

Awareness + Conversion Focus

We ran the tongue-in-cheek creative focused on brand lift alongside more casual and direct messaging aimed at conversion metrics aligned with Wellness’s goals.

Scroll-stopping Creative

Talking drawers + striking visuals = content you can’t scroll past. Our videos use striking, bright visuals, the cutest cats we could find, and witty talking drawers to draw people in.

We created two sets of spots to direct focus on both top of funnel awareness and bottom of funnel conversions. Economically building out the concepts allowed for versatile creative that was translated to a series of micro-content for this integrated campaign.

 

FINAL THOUGHTS

"Executing this concept meant taking a calculated risk to do something no one in the space had done, and I believe providing that kind of solution is what I enjoyed most about this project. Hopefully, all the frustrated cat owners will sleep a little better knowing there's a brand that truly understands those finicky cats."

Ebony Smith
Brand Strategist

"We knew we wanted a visual hook that would spark interest in our audience, so we decided to tell the story through the minds of talking drawers. Wellness was great throughout the whole process and they fully trusted us as we slowly pushed them out of their comfort zone. My favorite part of the project was figuring out how to make the drawers talk. We tossed around a few ideas like CGI and animation. Ultimately, we decided to film it all practically, using fishing line to open the drawers. I’m really happy with how everything turned out and I’m glad we were able to deliver."

Phil Roberts
EP / Director

"As a 5 year partner with the brand, we’re excited to continue to push the brand forward and build new connections with the right customers."

Gus Murillo
COO

"As a designer, I always enjoy projects where I am forced to use my hands in unconventional ways. It was a fun challenge trying to express the personalities of each drawer within a few seconds using physical objects placed in and around the drawer."

Corey Schneider
Senior Designer

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