Whiskas turns its missing cat into a real lost-cat rescue network

The war in Ukraine forced Mars Eurasia to shift Whiskas supply from Russia to Europe for the Kazakhstan market, so the brand arrived in a new technical pack with no iconic cat on the label and a much higher price. With no media budget, ordinary advertising could not explain the unfamiliar, costlier product, and contraband packs with the old design confused shoppers further.

Whiskas responded not by explaining but by reframing: it announced that its famous cat had 'run away' and turned the space normally spent on product ads into a rescue cause. It built loCATor, a Telegram chatbot mini-app, where an owner whose cat was missing sends a photo, and within a minute a geo-targeted alert is pushed across digital billboards, in-store screens, taxi displays, a city map app and local venues, while AI matches photos submitted by anyone who spots a cat on the street.

The campaign turned every city resident into a rescuer and made the brand's forced change meaningful instead of confusing. In the most traffic-light residential areas it even used ultra-cheap photo-traps - empty Whiskas boxes that still smelled of cat food - so cats climbed in and were identified. The result was reach delivered through relevance rather than media spend.