If you’re the type of person who knew that Friday, April 30, was National Hairball Awareness Day, then Feline Pine wants your attention. And they’re trying to get it by making you just a bit suspicious that your cat is plotting against you.

That’s the explanation behind a series of roadside billboards and sidewalk stencils purporting to come from a mysterious organization Cats Against Clay, and reaching a new peak in a full-page ad in the New York Times promising a struggle against some unnamed feline injustice. “Cats will have the last word,” the ad read. “Victory.”

The billboards, stencils and print ad are the leading edge of a stealth campaign for kitty litter brand Feline Pine, which bills itself as better for cats and for owners because it’s dust-, perfume- and chemical-free. And the URL in the ads leads to a Web site that seems to have angry postings from a variety of cats threatening various types of household retaliation if their “demands” are not met.

Those demands turn out to be humans’ reliance on clay kitty litter, which the cat cadre purportedly finds obnoxious. And the acts of sabotage, according to a video on the site, include unraveling the bathroom tissue until there’s nothing left on the roll—on the theory that what’s sauce for the pet is good for the owner.



So far, Feline Pine hasn’t been mentioned in the stealth campaign, which is working to build buzz among the cat-loving community. The strategic aim is to get cat lovers thinking as much about the litter they choose for their pets as they already do about the food they offer, says Bob Shaw, owner of Charlotte NC-based agency Concentric Marketing, which has been working with brand parent Nature’s Earth on the Feline Pine account for several years now.

Research showed that Feline Pine’s market is “cat indulgents”—people who are more likely than average to take pictures of their cat and forward them to friends on Facebook, to read cat blogs regularly and buy a lot of treats for their pets. “But as much as they’re indulgent and love their pets, people weren’t making the connection on cat litter,” Shaw says. “As long as their cat was using the littler box, they said, ‘Litter’s litter, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time reading the back labels and thinking about health.’”

Feline Pine brand manager Dan Henderson challenged Concentric to find a way to use social media to both inject some fun into the campaign and differentiate the product without bashing competing litter. So last October the agency started a Facebook page for Feline Pine to talk about the brand and general cat health issues. That page now has 11,000 fans.

That was valuable and educational for owners, but even though the page includes a photo gallery—better than catnip to rabid ailurophiles (cat fans)—the community didn’t offer the level quite the level of fun and engagement that Concentric wanted to build buzz.

And so an underground anti-clay resistance movement was born out of the suspicion that cats are basically mysterious and unknowable. “Research showed that even people who love their cats feel that they have ulterior motives, are kind of evil and may be plotting against them,” Shaw says, laughing. ‘So picking up on that, we created this quasi-revolutionary group Cats Against Clay.”

So the billboards came first in early April, in five markets, Chicago, New York, Miami, San Francisco and Atlanta. Next came the sidewalk spraywashing campaign that put the CatsAgainstClay.org logo and URL in about 75 locations around these cities. And about 15 days after that came the ad in the national New York Times, on April 22.

“That really exploded the thing, and we saw people talking about it on Twitter and in blogs,” Shaw says. At the same time, the agency sent reps to Columbus OH to attend BlogPaws, the first cat blogger conference. Those ambassadors gave out “Power to the Pawpulace” T shirts (with the .org URL on the back) to the 250 blogger attendees and put “Think Outside the Box” hangers on their hotel doors. Kits with shirts and coffee mugs were also sent out to additional relevant animal and environmental bloggers, along with tagged copies of the times with that ad.

“This all ties in to where we’re headed with the campaign—it isn’t just a random ‘Isn’t this cat funny?’ idea,” Shaw says. “All of this is designed to move people to the Web site, which has had 30,000 hits in the first three and a half weeks.” And a companion Facebook page to the Cats Against Clay campaign has garnered 9,500 fans in the same space of time, mostly through a Facebook “quiz” designed to detect covert tendencies in one’s cat. Naturally, they all fail the trust test.

The goal for the clients was to reach 10,000 Facebook fans for the Cats Against Clay campaign, so after only 3.5 weeks, the effort is poised to reach its engagement target.

“The really cool thing is that people aren’t just friending the Facebook page,” Shaw says. “They’re bantering back and forth and have uploaded a ton of pictures. So we’re really starting to grab that audience.”

So far the Feline Pine brand hasn’t made an appearance in this stealth campaign. Shaw says it will be worked in eventually over the next few weeks. The blogging cats have already seeding references to a mysterious benefactor that’s bankrolling the cat resistance movement. In coming weeks, they will go on a journey to discover that Feline Pine makes sense for them and may in fact take over parts of the Feline Pine Web site.

The underground campaign will also jump offline in coming weeks, with a live-event protest by human sympathizers at UC Berkeley and other real-world integrations not yet to be named, Shaw says.

Since cats come in just behind babies and coupons as attention-grabbing devices in social media, Nature’s Earth and Concentric may at some future point have to decide to either stamp out the kitty liberation movement or take it to some other level. “We’re looking at turning it into something more permanent than we had originally planned,” Shaw says, “because the energy around it is so good.”

That’s a nice problem to have. But for now, Concentric’s staff is just having fun building the personae of the various cat bloggers on CatsAgainstClay.org and responding to the accolades from cat lovers.

“I’ve owned my own agency for 10 years, and no one’s ever asked me for copies of our print ads suited for use as posters,” Shaw says.