Cats don’t carry money. For one thing, they don’t have pockets. For another, they have something far more valuable to offer – their purr. Unfortunately, purrs were the last and greatest globally recognised currency to be traded exclusively offline.

Until now.

Whiskas takes purrs seriously. It’s the ultimate sign of cat enjoyment, of happiness with the food in front of them, and of connection with their cat parent. All cats Purr More with Whiskas.

We launched Pay by Purr to finally let cats pay for the delicious Whiskas they crave with their most valuable asset: the illusive purr.

To prevent counterfeiting, we trained an AI to detect and evaluate genuine feline purrs from human imitations. Thanks to Pay by Purr, thousands of cats could now purr into a mobile device to earn prizes and vouchers their parents could exchange in shops for tasty, tasty Whiskas.

There is no sweeter sound for a loving cat parent than their own cat’s purr. Whiskas loves that sound as much as they do. If a purr is so valuable, we thought, why can’t cats exchange it for Whiskas?

So, we built Pay by Purr: the world's first mobile web app that interprets the unique sound of your cat’s purr and rewards it with prizes and money off Whiskas.

Stroke your cat (or feed them Whiskas), hit record, and the AI analyses their special purr, from the classic crooners to the jet engine rumblers. Thanks to our AI’s custom “purr-nalysis” engine, we could recognise each purr’s volume, length, frequency, resonance and other factors.

The bigger the purr, the bigger the reward, with prizes of up to €1,000 off Whiskas. Live global leaderboards kept people coming back for more, competing to become top cat

The purpose of Pay by Purr was to use interactive experience to connect the feeling and messaging of Purr More through to retail. This built support from retail partners and shifted purchase behaviour.

To do it, we needed to target cat parents on mobile in moments when they might be near their cats. Using a variety of target methods, we cast a wide net in digital and social channels to achieve the audience size we needed.

Once cat parents clicked through, the brilliance of the experience was that simply using it and receiving a reward resulted in sharing valuable data with Whiskas, including their personal contact, cat’s name, and purr. This was connected to the in-person shop experience and reward redemption with our retail partners.

We started by connecting with cat parents at the time they would most likely be with their cats; directing cat parents to our web app to submit and monetise their cats purr.

After a period of seconds, our app was able to provide the cat parent with purr analysis. Machine learning powered this analysis, and our AI was trained with thousands of purrs from cats all over the world, allowing it to diagnose the data signals in real time and give feedback to cat parents. AI even recognised thousands of human sounds, so anyone trying to cheat would be swiped away.

We rewarded successful purrs with money off Whiskas and took their personal details throughout the experience; allowing us to build a relationship with them on a one to one basis.

Leaderboards also encouraged repeat play as cat parents competed to have the best purrs and shared with their friends.

As a part of the Purr More campaign, Pay by Purr helped increase penetration in its launch region to the highest level in two years. Value share of category grew at the same time that our key competitor experienced a value share decline of -0.9%. It also shifted the category pricing dynamics, according to revenue modelling. Whiskas now grows in volume when at price parity with its main competitor, and it holds share better during competitor discounting.

Pay by Purr beat pre-campaign performance benchmarks by 31%. It reached 10m+ cat parents from 27m+ media impressions, resulting in 350k purrs analysed and 35k repeat experience visitors. 100% of available coupons and retail prizes were claimed through our retail partners in all participating regions.