There are about 12.5 million cats living in Germany. Their owners spend €1.6 billion on cat food every year. FELIX, the Nestlé Purina Petcare brand for clever cats is a big player in this field. In such a competitive market and in times in which cat content rules the Internet, every brand is challenged to stand out by providing shareable and innovative content for their communities.

In order to drive awareness and to underline the ‘FELIX’ brand essence as innovative and clever, we developed “Follow Felix”.

We combined the latest technology trends with the insights that cat content is still the number one content of the internet and that millions of cat owners wish to know what their cats are doing while strolling around outside.

Using these facts we created innovative, shareable cat content to enlarge and entertain our community.

We started by searching for 50 cats, developed a custom made safety harness, which could carry a GPS tracker and fitted the cats with our “wearable”. Then, we developed a microsite, where we created individual profiles for each cat and visualised the collected GEO-data. For three weeks, we tracked the ways of our cats and published them together with shareable content such as videos, pictures, expert articles and a clever game.

Print, online media and TV stations reported about the project. Our web and social media numbers skyrocketed and we achieved about 1500% more webpage visits, doubled our Facebook engagement and reached 70 million contacts through all channels.

We started by connecting a GPS tracker with a specially invented safety harness for our cats. Having the perfect tool and location, we began our cat casting. 50 cat owners were cast via local media, city festivals and among PURINA employees. On our microsite, cats got individual profiles and were tracked on a map. In addition to content such as videos, photos, expert articles and our “catistics”, we developed an entertaining game: our cats strived to collect different badges for their daily “performances” while users could bet on which cat would win the most badges.

We used social media channels, blogger and media outreach to distribute our content. Afterwards, we created an infographic with all the exciting insights we gained, which we again seeded via those channels.

Although the project was shifted from summer to winter 2014 and we had budget shifts, we received great results.

Thanks to “Follow Felix” we not only increased FELIX’ awareness within the target group but also received highest engagement rates ever on the brand’s social media channels.

Compared to the years before, we had 1.500% more visits on the brand website. The campaign videos were seen more than 0.6 million times and we reached 3.5 Million cats enthusiasts on Facebook.

The FELIX Facebook page doubled its engagement rate up to 1.6% during the project, breaking the records with a video post which had an engagement rate of 8.5% – an all-time record.

So far, we created a media reach of more than 70 million contacts on TV as well as in online and print media – more to come within the next weeks. The media and blogger coverage was 100% positive and fully communicated the key messages.