My Best Friend for Ultra Pet | Retroviral Online Branding

Introducing Ultra Pet’s most successful and ‘viral’ campaign in the brand’s history - My Best Friend. A dog is meant to be a man’s best friend, but we’ve never seen a dog food commercial where the bestie is able to choose what he eats...until now.

My Best Friend showcases how, as Brendan Seery of Bizcommunity puts it, “if your dog really is your best friend, you’d let him choose the food he’d like to eat” and he would choose Ultra Pet.

The campaign video attracted 80 000 new visitors to ultrapet.co.za, 2,3 million organic TikTok views, and R5m+ million in earned media (with no paid-media investment).

Statement of the problem:

Ultra Pet has traditionally been distributed via a B2B2C model, where veterinarians act as the intermediary channel for reaching the customer and making sales. The brand required a mass talkability campaign to transition to a B2C play. With most consumers shopping at super and hypermarkets for their pet food, we needed to stand out from the highly competitive, market clutter, with a limited budget and encourage consumers to switch to Ultra Pet.

Key insights that drove our creative

We have evidence that consumers care for their pets as equals in South Africa
Humanising animals has the positive association we are looking to create to build brand love for Ultrapet
Viral social: TikTok has become the defacto platform for ‘viral’ content amplification
Dogs are the most popular pets in South Africa, therefore using a dog would have a stronger resonance with our audience.

Planning:

My Best Friend is a brand campaign with a hero video at its heart. We leveraged the trend of anthropomorphism, by placing our protagonist within a ‘dog suit’, to humanise the pet, which enabled him to illicit the traits of a human best friend and choose the food he actually wants to eat.

Execution:

The campaign officially kicked off on 2 December 2022. We launched with our hero video featuring @Rogi_the_Perogi and @WillyBalls, our dog and human-dog protagonists. The video was shared on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube with an immediate positive response.

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