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The animated black and white cat FELIX® and his love of mischief has been at the heart of Nestlé’s Purina® brand communication for years, and is the UK’s no.1 pet food brand.

Building on this existing strong brand affinity, the start of FELIX®’s ‘#uptomischief’ campaign in 2017 invited consumers to directly engage with the friendly feline for the first time through 3D experiential activations at train stations and events.

Keen to keep driving direct consumer engagement through innovative interaction techniques, in 2019 the FELIX® brand team experimented bringing the much-loved cat to life on smartphones in everyday scenarios through the use of Augmented Reality, with the aim of encouraging cat owners to create their own little bit of ‘FELIX® Mischief’ on their mobiles.

With the onset of 2020’s pandemic, this year’s campaign wanted to reach out to as many of the UK’s millions of cat lovers and owners as possible to try to bring a bit of happiness and smiles at a time when so many are at home due to the ongoing Covid-19 restrictions.

Cutting-edge creativity and collaboration
To achieve this, the FELIX® brand team partnered with Facebook to evolve the existing ‘#uptomischief’ campaign and create an AR experience that enabled FELIX® to scale to the broader audience required to drive business impact and deepen brand love.

The 2020 creative focused on FELIX® acting mischievously in work-from-home situations. By amplifying the cat’s character with a creative that was situated in, and reflective of, the current environment would hopefully resonate with consumers and strengthen their existing connection, or form a new one, with the brand.

FELIX®’s creative agency AFG Europe and media partner Zenith UK worked together, as they had previously since the start of the ‘#uptomischief’ campaign, with the help of specialist Augmented Reality agency Poplar Studio, to drive the creative process forward. Lots of testing of different creative routes and messages allowed all of the teams to hone in on the most engaging creative. AFG Europe then built out the stories for Facebook, working with Poplar Studio to create a seamless AR experience build in the Spark AR platform on Facebook. 

The collaborating teams also faced certain challenges that come when working with cutting-edge technology. Checking that the FELIX® audience would be interested in playing with an Augmented Reality experience on a smartphone was key. Research quickly showed that this execution would indeed appeal to UK cat lovers.

Then, how to construct the AR experience in such a way that facilitated a smooth and intuitive consumer journey, encouraging consumers to actively engage with the experience, and enjoy doing so. The technical build had to work on all types of smartphone and crucially, load quickly.

The end result were mobile-first creative assets across Facebook and Instagram that each contained a CTA for consumers to deepen their engagement with FELIX® to click through and experience the AR filter to have fun with FELIX® in their own home.

Friendly feline delivers purrfect result
The ‘#uptomischief’ 2020 campaign delivered brand impact at scale to an audience of almost six million cat lovers, mass awareness of the FELIX® brand and AR effect using the mobile-first formats to Facebook and Instagram cat-loving audiences, as well as taking advantage of AR ads for the effect to be used within the platforms’ Feed environment.

It also showed cat owners were spending on average between 20 and 30 seconds playing with the AR experience in their own homes and were able to use the Facebook technology to save and share their AR experiences with friends and family.

The campaign did not only drive brand affinity but also created meaningful engagement experiences with cat owners. The combination of building a campaign around true consumer insights, a relevant and topical creative, strong focus on an intuitive consumer journey and using cutting-edge technology has led to a multiple award-winning campaign.