In New Zealand, Pedigree launched a campaign to promote its new SelfieSTIX product which helps dog owners to create perfect selfies with their pets, winning a raft of Cannes Lions mobile awards in the process.
The dog food brand created a product that attaches the brand’s DentaStix dog chew products to any mobile phone to help capture their pet’s attention and focus for the perfect photo.
An integrated campaign featured photogenic dogs, showcasing their best duckface and blue steel looks will run across digital, social, print and in-store media across Australia and New Zealand, ahead of a global rollout.
The app converted peoples’ canine companions into a cast of characters, including police officers, aviators, university graduates, safari explorers and cowboys by using a unique combination of canine facial recognition technology and machine learning to track the dog’s face, which allows for accurate placing of the filters.
It then lets people share their filtered selfie through social media and will release new filters around special occasions like Valentine’s Day and Easter. The campaign was created in partnership with Colenso BBDO.
“We love our dogs, so why not give dogs access to all the fun things us humans have too?” said Cormac van den Hoofdakker, brand manager of Pedigree at Mars NZ.
“The Pedigree SelfieSTIX phone clip meant that people could have meaningful moments of closeness with their dogs in the form of a perfect selfie. But with the Pedigree SelfieSTIX app, it truly takes those selfies to the next level.”
Often considered an incremental purchase and a ‘functional’ treating product, we needed to find a PR-friendly way to encourage customers to pick up the Pedigree’s DentaSTIX product over competitors, shifting perception of DentaSTIX to a ‘positive’ treating product.
The brief was to create a value-add; to create meaningful moments between dogs and their owners; to drive repeat purchase of the DentaSTIX product.
Pedigree DentaSTIX sat within the smaller ‘functional’ treating segment within a fast-growing care and treats category, but Pedigree wanted to relaunch DentaSTIX so it would cross over into ‘positive’ treating as well.
PEDIGREE® SelfieSTIX Case Study from Colenso BBDO on Vimeo.
By creating a mobile-first brand experience that had a strong presence in social media, we were able to give DentaSTIX social currency as a treat. Our audience were all dog owners, with a slightly younger skew, targeting those who were already in the habit of sharing pictures of their dogs.
Pedigree trained a neural network to recognise dog faces by feeding it thousands of dog images. Over time, the trained algorithm learned to recognise similar patterns across all images and then, whenever the dog looks at the camera, the app places a fun filter on its face.
The clip, app and campaign elements encouraged the sharing of images and videos across all social platforms – letting dog owners participate in a rich social community of like-minded pet owners.
SelfieSTIX and the accompanying app not only encouraged people to share their perfect doggy pics, it also encouraged repeat purchase of Pedigree DentaSTIX.
Across social platforms, the campaign had over 2.1 million interactions. The campaign achieved 3.5 million engagements, a 24% increase in sales and one quarter of the country’s dog owners redeemed SelfieSTIX.
