Teens understand the health effects of smoking, but most do not correlate how smoking impacts their daily lives. Smoking affects just about everything teens care about – relationships, the environment, and even animals – in immediate and unexpected ways. Combining that understanding with the knowledge that teens are video-content connoisseurs, led us to our idea: We know that teens consume tons of video on topics such as ‘Music, ‘Food’, ‘Fashion’ and especially ‘Cat Videos.’ We also know that 60% of Millennials own a cherished pet. However, our target didn't know that cats and dogs are twice as likely to get cancer if their owner smokes. And…no cats means no more cat videos -- which make up 45% of all videos uploaded to YouTube! Losing the Internet's beloved cat videos would truly be a "#CATmageddon"…so of course, we had to do something.

Our media fully began the day of the Grammys with multiple partners promoting Video, Rich Media, Social, Custom and other high impacts units. TV premiered with 2 spots during the Grammy program which promoted a massive social response. We were able to sustain that momentum by utilizing our key partners to launch custom content/creative throughout the first phase of the campaign, bringing about additional engagement and interaction with the truth brand.

Utilizing our key social partners, we executed high impact units that drove interaction with our target. A Twitter Moments/Trending topic drove up social conversations and a Snapchat geo-filter gave us a customizable way to engage our audience. Our key content partners catapulted our highly engaging content, including: Twitch’s CATmageddon Livestream, Gawker’s Escape from CATmageddon Game, Buzzfeed’s “A World without Cats: A Parody Trailer,” plus numerous other relevant youth centered partner programs.

The campaign has shown huge success in the 1st week of going live. #CATmageddon hashtags garnered over 38K mentions in the 1st week; 152% above the goal. The 7 day video view goal generated over 34MM views, which was 207% above the goal and the highest 7 day view total for any truth campaign. Both Instagram and Twitter saw a 3-5% growth in followers within the first week of launch. To date, the current campaign has delivered over 1 billion impressions served across TV, Digital, Social and Search. Our key metrics have driven continuous success, especially vs. the previous campaign; 101MM video views (+72%), 65K social mentions (+76%), and 938K engagements (+35%). With more than two months to go, the #CATmageddon campaign is proving to be one of the most successful in truth's nearly sixteen year history. And we are one more step closer to finishing smoking for good.