What do pet food firm ProDiet and cats have in common? They want real seafood

As part of its Kami Nak 100% Makanan Laut! (We Want Real Seafood) campaign, pet food company ProDiet has launched a teaser and film shot from the perspective of cats demanding real seafood from their pet owners. Done in collaboration with Reprise Digital, the playful take on the messaging was further cemented through the campaign microsite featuring commentary, posters and a petition to join the uprising for real seafood.

The film and microsite messaging sees the cats leaving threatening messages for their owners demanding real seafood, meeting in a cat parliament (Parlimeow), with protest slogans including "nine lives matter" and tips and tricks for their fellow cats to learn how to deal with owners’ non-compliance to real food requests. The integrated campaign in Bahasa Malaysia runs till March, with the film released across all digital platforms.

CEO of ProDiet, PY Choy, said it was excited by the enthusiasm of the Reprise team to challenge this idea of 100% Real Seafood. "What better way to show this off than through the cats? This quirky idea of cats not getting the real deal and standing up to their owners was very compelling, with the campaign having potential for further legs down the line to show the aftereffects of this cat uprising," Choy said. He described this as "a fun, bizarre, and comical campaign" that ProDiet hopes all cat and pet owners will enjoy.

Meanwhile, Reprise's creative director, Mandar Wairkar, explained that the team flexed its "cathletic" minds with this campaign, right down to bringing cats in for a focus group discussion. "They meowed, we listened. Since cats are notoriously fussy eaters, we chose to give them a dissenting voice to demand for better food. And ProDiet’s proposition of 100% real seafood has allowed us to create a pet revolution of sorts. Something that is by cats, for cats," Wairka said.

He added that by getting into the minds of cats, Reprise played out these very real problems from their perspective and imagined how the conversation would go between them. "The lingo, grammar and spelling are all reflected in cat-speak, so to say. It was a tremendously fun process to reimagine things in this way, and we definitely hope Malaysians find it a-meow-sing," Wairkar said.