Catnip Campaigns and ROI Dreams

Consumers are suckers for a great marketing campaign, and apparently so are cats — provided said campaign is covered in catnip. So when Bulk Cat Litter Warehouse needed to send out some direct mail, Rethink Canada created a flyer that caught people’s cats’ attention first.

Have you checked your mail recently?

The average adult receives 41 pounds of traditional direct mail every year (that’s 16 pieces per week!) and more than half of it goes straight into the trash.

Grabbing consumers’ attention is the name of the game, but that can be nearly impossible in a time when everyone is bombarded with almost 5,000 ad messages daily.

It’s time for companies to get creative.

A new kind of “spray and pray”

Vancouver-based creative agency Rethink Canada created a catnip-coated flyer promoting Bulk Cat Litter Warehouse’s products and pricing, and the results were...well, see for yourself:

(For those who have never had a cat and are thoroughly confused, here’s some quick info on why kitties love catnip.)

Simple and brilliant, and it’s not the first time.

Rethink Canada has created tons of excellent campaigns, most famously the Canadian Beer Fridge and the “Gayest spot ever,” both of which received a lot of attention before and during the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

What about the ROI?

Have you ever heard of a healthy marathon runner running the first 25 miles, only to pack up and head home?

This is the way I see many companies treating their marketing — they blog, they create videos, they chat with their customers on social media, but they stop short of measuring their efforts’ effectiveness.

Rethink Canada’s campaigns are awesome, but are they beneficial to the businesses for which they were created? A couple of their portfolio pieces have some ROI stats, but for the most part it’s just videos and creative process explanations.

People are talking about the catnip campaign, but it’s more important that they buy the litter the flyer is promoting. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Success requires more than creativity

I’ve written before about the importance of creativity in marketing, but you also need to track that creativity’s effectiveness and use it to come up with something even better.

It’s not easy — and it will only get harder — but it may mean the difference between business success and failure.

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[Image: photon_de]