Kitty juggernaut has your attention
Pussy power on the internet is close to limitless.
What is it with people and cats? We just can’t resist their furry faces and quirky ways. And marketers know it – a cat in an advertisement is a ‘‘purrrfect’’ way to get our attention.
Just in case you missed it, cat power has been working its magic again. On September 14, the Citizens Advertising Takeover Service (Cats) took over the advertising billboards in London’s Clapham Tube Station and replaced them with posters of cats.
From a campaign perspective, it went viral. (Or is that feral?) It got the kind of media pick-up that most campaigns only dream of, appearing in pretty much all British press, then spreading to Canada, the United States, France and Germany.
Here in New Zealand, Fairfax Media ran its own poll asking: ‘‘What do you think of cats replacing ads?’’ And that’s not to mention the number of Clapham-Tube-cute-cat-poster selfies shared on social media.
Last week, Cats said the response to the tube takeover had been so overwhelming it was hoping to do the same thing in Los Angeles, Washington, Barcelona, Atlanta and Cape Town.
What’s surprising is that the organisation behind Cats, Glimpse, wasn’t selling anything. Quite the opposite. It said it was just a group of creative people who wanted to do something people would enjoy, because ‘‘it’s exhausting being asked to buy stuff all the time’’, and because it would help cats find homes. The campaign was linked to the Battersea Cats and Dogs Home.
Glimpse chose cats for a reason: Pussy power on the internet is close to limitless.
In 2015, there were estimated to be more than 2 million cat videos on YouTube, and ‘‘cats’’ is one of the web’s most searched keywords. We share, watch and engage with cat content all the time. It gets our attention and that’s the nirvana marketers are looking for.
Remember Grumpy Cat, whose owner innocently posted a photo of her grumpy looking cat on Reddit in 2012 and watched it go viral? She now owns a company worth a disputed US$100 million (NZ$138m) selling Grumpy Cat merchandise including books, games, clothes, colouring books, stickers, party packs and toys.
Mercedes, Ikea, Skittles and Toyota have all done cat adverts in recent years. App-based taxi service Uber teamed up with the SPCA at Christmas last year to deliver kittens to Auckland and Wellington offices. For $30 you could have a kitty cuddle session.
From a brand perspective it was a coup for Uber, which had entered the New Zealand market eight months earlier and was battling perception issues, taxi firms and regulators. The public relations stunt helped Uber break out of the negative media cycle and into a feel-good factor.
So, what next for cats? Just when I was about to go off on a tangent about how people will use cats to sell anything, US web domain hosting service GoDaddy beat me to the punch. It created a fake company – Gato-Chapeau – making little hats for cats.
There’s a commercial fronted by the faux hat maker, a website and glossy photos of cats in hats.
The company’s not real, but those feline faces have already pulled you in before GoDaddy lets the cat out of the bag to say, ‘‘No matter how crazy your business idea might be, we’re here to help.’’
As the Cats team said: ‘‘There’s an infinite appetite for cats on the internet.’’
❚ Sue Allen has worked in journalism, communications, marketing and brand management for 15 years.