Collaboration with ad tech partner PadSquad proves lucrative for the pet food brand.
While the decision to invest in mobile advertising may be easy, creatively devising ways to stand out and make a lasting impression is far more challenging. Integrating technological advances like AR in advertising campaigns can help your message stand out from the crowd of static or video social ads.
Media strategy agency Exverus Media teamed up with PadSquad, the high-impact advertising experiences leader, to develop a new mobile ad experience for Stella & Chewy’s, the raw natural pet food for dogs and cats. Together, we built an interactive AR experience in which pet parents were encouraged to upload photos with their pets, decorate them with AR frames and filters, and upload them to social media.
Our interactive programmatic mobile experience helped make Stella & Chewy’s a category leader in just a few months. Nearly a quarter-million users engaged with this campaign, leading to a 702% higher engagement rate than standard benchmarks. Stella & Chewy’s experienced an incremental 2% lift in brand awareness from just this one tactic with a <$500K budget. And the campaign won the 2023 MediaPost OMMA Award for Best Mobile Marketing campaign of the year!
“This is the sort of participatory advertising that brands dream of,” said Anna Elema, Media Director at Exverus. “Stella & Chewy’s is now a category competitor with a deeper connection to a growing segment of brand loyalists.”
Utilizing technology like AR in advertising campaigns requires a strong ad tech partner, a data-driven media strategy, and personal connections with the target audience. In this case, we tapped into the emotional connection people have with their pets and allowed them to be creative with the ad unit, to make something uniquely their own, and to share photos of their pets, which pet owners already love to do.
The case study was featured by Adweek here.