See how the theme's within Cats & Dogs- The Revenge of Kitty Galore were successfully introduced to an unfamiliar audience.
The background of the campaign was to primarily promote the release of the Warner Bros film Cats & Dogs- The Revenge of Kitty Galore. The campaign aimed to familiarise the target audience with the film's main characters and themes.
The campaign's specific objective was to highlight the film's heroes and villains in a fun and familiar way and to introduce the target audience to the film's key themes. They also wanted children to show appreciation to their pets, and use their bond with their own pets to create a common link to the film's characters. An emphasis was made on the target audience having fun with their animals and be more creative.
Warner Bros decided to work with an existing Turner property 'Pet of the Week', a hugely popular mechanic where kids could nominate their pets to become 'Pet of the Week' and the chosen pet features on-air and online in either 1 of 4 categories - Exotic, Furry, Feathered or Farmyard. They created 3 'spoof' Pet of the Week spots for the main characters of the new film release - Kitty, Diggs and Catherine. Kids were then asked to go online to help create a new disguise for Kitty to be in with the chance to win ace Cats&Dogs prizes.
The results issued culminated in a multi- territory campaign, with the promotion spreading to France, Italy, Spain and Germany, as well as the UK. The total visits to the Cats & Dogs microsites totaled to over 25,000, and the total number of competition entries was over 6,100. The average time spent on the microsites rested at just over five minutes.
The key learnings of this specific campaign was that familiarisation really helped the audience to build a connection with the film before they had even seen it and, in the process, encouraged children to appreciate their own pets at home. By allowing children to make their own disguises for Kitty Galore, the film passively encouraged creativity, and this stood this campaign apart from other competitions in which used games as their method of creating an emotional bond to a product.