Be Your cat

To keep its brand portfolio fresh, Purina was about to introduce the new Taste Sensations line for its Friskies cat food. Unfortunately for the brand, consumers often view the entire brand portfolio as a singular flavor option. Purina needed to drive awareness for the new options and differentiate between the new varieties and Friskies current line-up. Cat owners are “food polygamists” when it comes to cat food. They know that if they feed their cat too much of one flavor, they’ll stop eating altogether, keeping them from committing to one regular brand.

Research into cat behavior narrowed the cause of their picky eating habits to their instinct to “hunt” and the level of interest in their meal. Purina partnered with online gaming channel Double Fusion to create the first-ever scavenger hunt online game. Gamers were challenged with “hunting” the Friskies Butterfly logo throughout a series of different games – just like their cat’s Seeking Circuit before mealtime! By clicking each logo they found, cat enthusiasts were engaged with multi-sensory sight and sound messaging about the four different varieties of Friskies cat food. Each day, the person who found the most Friskies Butterflies throughout all games was awarded a code to download their choice of Double Fusion Game for free. The games were surrounded with rich media banners showing cats doing their own seeking circuit – finding Friskies varieties at the end. Site users were also given the opportunity to play 10 of the site’s premium priced games for free for an hour their first time, courtesy of Friskies. The program was supported by other cross-platform media such as TV, search and online branding.

The Taste Sensations brand experienced a 13.7% lift in unaided brand awareness. The click through rate on the Friskies Seeking Circuit banners surrounding the game was 6x the average for a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brand.