Cesar is a Mars Inc Pet Care brand. This Christmas they needed a global campaign to drive saliency with dog owners and promote their brand positioning ‘Love Them Back’.

With the cost of broadcast reach inaccessible for most markets and with a limited pot of cash to do everything, the brand needed an idea that could run across multiple markets, with varying levels of investment and to achieve both saliency for the brand and stand out at point of sale.

We could have simply made matching Christmas jumpers and stopped there. But to generate fame and get customers rushing to the shelfs we had to do more. Getting dogs to design the sweaters was the more.

Capturing data in our custom-built design studio turned their simply movements into design outcomes.

No longer was a run simply moving from point a to point b, it was a timed movement through a tunnel of rotating colours that stopped when the dog existed to pick a base colour for the sweater.

A bark went from being a noisy announcement to something that was recorded, turned into a soundwave and then stitched down the sleeve of a jumper.

To target dog owners and get them to buy more Cesar we knew we had to have a unique angle, an angle that would play off their love of animals.

So, we created a range of sweaters designed by the dogs themselves.

Every element of their natural behaviour was used to collect data; running, wagging, barking and jumping.

Through a variety of technology these behaviours were then interpreted to create a design outcome.

To win one of the sweaters consumers had to buy a pack of Cesar and insert the on-pack code into our website.

If successful, owners chose one of the three jumper designs. If not, they were served a voucher for another pack of Cesar and could try again.

Just 3 minutes after launch the US ran out of Sweaters.

The dog’s designs were covered in big name fashion mags like GQ, Cosmopolitan and L’officiel.

We received 130 million earned media impressions.

Sales of Cesar were up as much as 22%