Cravendale are the only filtered milk brand in the UK. They’re a bit nuts about milk - from the grass the cows eat, to the music they’re played at milking time. For Cravendale everything about the milk matters. Which makes them a bit special; particularly because milk is one of those things that nobody really thinks twice about. We needed a campaign to jolt people out of that apathy. To sweep them up in the same ridiculous enthusiasm about milk that Cravendale have themselves.

So "Cats with Thumbs" was born. The first execution in Cravendale’s "The Milk Matters" campaign. What begins as a simple observation about cat’s love of milk spins out into an engagingly surreal multi-media narrative about thumbed cats plotting to steal the Cravendale and ultimately take over the world.

Two weeks before launch, garments 'knitted by cats with thumbs' were sent to the cats of key bloggers. Building conversations around polydactyl (thumbed) cats and pointing people to Bertrum Thumbcat (our hero cat from the TVC) on Facebook/Twitter.Days later an unbranded viral video proving the existence of thumbcats was posted on YouTube, capturing public interest and getting picked up by news channels.

The TV ad launched the following week.

The 'Thumbs Up' viral received 1 million+ views on YouTube in 4 days, global news coverage on sites including the Huffington Post, The Sun, CBS and ITN news and was still receiving 250,000+ hits a day when the TV ad launched. The TV spot received 2m+ views on YouTube in under three weeks. It became the #1 Top Rated video in Entertainment on YouTube in the UK (our market) in its first month and was shared 284,000+ times on Facebook.

Weekly mentions of Cravendale on Twitter increased 22 fold, from an average 27 tweets per day to 631 per day on week one, with Twitter mentions of Cravendale reaching a rate of over one per second during the advert's first primetime airing.Bertrum continues interacting with 40,000+ fans on social networks, with 4 million+ impressions on Facebook alone within three weeks.And sales? An 8% increase in the first week.