Cat owners love their cats unreservedly. But cats use their irresistible charm to get what they want from their owners. What they want is food (Dine), but more often than not, they give us the cold shoulder. Not even their shoulder. We seldom see anything but the back of them.

So how can we improve the quality of time that cat owners spend with their somewhat aloof pals?

Enter Dine Creamy Treats – a hand-fed treat in a single-serve pouch that provides a special moment of connection between owner and cat. Our objective was simple: to help cat owners get more quality face time and enhance the emotional connection with their feline friends, ultimately leading to the creative platform – “Get more face-to-face time.”

This 60-second film is a love story about a man and his cat. The story follows a man whose world begins to fall apart when he realises he's never seen his beloved cat's face. A glimmer of hope arrives in the pet food aisle, when the man picks up a pack of Dine Creamy Treats. The key to a heart-warming moment and some much-needed face-to-face time between the man and his cat.

The film launched online and was supported by 30" & 15" TV spots and 6" YouTube bumpers.

To help cat owners get more face-to-face time with their loved ones, we created Cat Scanner – a mobile web app that uses non-facial recognition technology to detect everything but your cat’s face.

The object detection component of the app uses Google’s Cloud Vision, tasking machine learning to identify if there’s a cat in the photo or not. To find out if the cat in the photo was looking at the camera, the network ‘learned’ from over 5000 images of cat faces. Combining these two tools, we could determine if the image contained a cat, a cat’s face or neither.

Once cat owners uploaded their cat photo, the direct response mechanic rewarded people with a voucher for a free sachet of Dine Creamy Treats.

The innovative sampling approach was one part of an integrated campaign. Prior to launch, we asked people to share photos of their cats on social media, thus seeding the problem. The campaign was supported with a heart-warming 30” TVC and across OOH, print, in-store and digital. Developed for the New Zealand market, the product & campaign will also be launching in other markets including the UK, Europe, Australia and China.