The CESAR dog food brand was preparing to launch Wholesome Bowls, a new product line created to help consumers overcome their aversion to wet food and amplify the core brand message around “shared experiences” between pets and pet parents. The new bowls looked good enough for humans – a nice advance over the wet food of the past. And the job at hand was to convince those humans (particularly millennial pet parents) to consider purchase and trial.

The pandemic lockdowns had left people feeling many things in extremes. Chief among them: lonely and hungry. Dog-adoption rates surged. And the use of food-delivery apps doubled. As homebound pet parents bonded with their dogs at home while ordering tons of delivery, it gave CESAR a unique opportunity to intersect and introduce a new breed of wet food, using those twin realities to help them overcome their wet-food hangups.

The result was Bestie Bowls from CESAR, a limited-time “pup-up” restaurant on Postmates that allowed dogs to get in on the meal-delivery-app frenzy for the first time ever. Catering to both homebound pets and their parents, Bestie Bowls delivered Yours and Theirs meals to people and their dogs – giving them a never-before-seen way to share mealtime together. And giving CESAR a breakthrough way to introduce its new Wholesome Bowls.

We opted to partner with Postmates - a brand popular with our millennial target - to replace our physical event with a digital experience that offered our homebound pets and pet owners a unique, shared, dining moment. One that would appeal to our target’s aesthetics and deliver a duo of bowls (for dog and human) curated to hero the new product and make the CESAR brand’s “shared-life” ethos sing.

The delivered meal-duos included a Wholesome Bowl for dogs and a human bowl created by Jeff Mauro (Food Network host, chef & author). To amp up the urgency, deliveries were made available for a limited -time (July 13), in limited supply (200 X 2 markets: NY & LA), and sold out in 2-3 hours. Each included a branded bag/collateral, Cesar Wholesome Bowls, and a branded salad container featuring Mauro’s bowl for pet parents. On July 13, consumers in these markets were served ads in the Postmates app driving to this offer.

We expanded our footprint and took things national via an online giveaway that gave all pet parents a chance to experience Bestie Bowls. Consumers were encouraged to take a picture of a shared moment of joy with their dog and share it on Instagram, or our site, for a chance to win a years’ worth of Wholesome Bowls.

The Bestie Bowls campaign generated a total of 355 placements, driving more than 829.3M impressions – more than 4X the goal. And sales increased 10.3% while the campaign was in market (from campaign launch to one week after paid support ended: 7/13-8/21).

Social influencer content drove an authenticated engagement rate (total engagements / total impressions) of 14.51%, exceeding the industry benchmark of 5%. And across the board, audiences reacted favorably to our influencer partners branded content, with over 60% positive sentiment overall...over 4 percentage points higher than the benchmark.