Whiskas has joined forces with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to raise funds to protect tigers in the wild. The Mars-owned brand plans to raise £500,000 (€583,000) for the environmental charity's global tiger conservation efforts by contributing a sum from every special pack of Whiskas sold in the UK and Ireland to the WWF's Tigers Alive initiative.
Television vet Pete Wedderburn - aka Pete the Vet from TV3's Ireland AM – will host an in-store "cat clinic" at five Tesco outlets as part of the Irish publicity push for the Whiskas campaign.
The campaign is also being supported by digital, point-of-sale and television advertising, with the TV ad, created by the agency AMV BBDO, highlighting that since the start of the 20th century 95 per cent of the world’s wild tigers have disappeared, leaving as few as 3,200. The WWF wants to double the number of wild tigers by 2022.
This is not the first time Whiskas has looked to big cats to help it market its petfood products – an earlier TV ad launched in March drew parallels between the behaviour of wild felines and the smaller domesticated kind.
The WWF takes the view that high-profile associations with household name brands helps it take its message and work further. Other brands to have formed marketing partnerships with the organisation include Sky, which invited customers to "adopt a jaguar" or sponsor an acre of rainforest, and Coca-Cola, which contributed to a WWF Arctic support fund for polar bears, a long-term advertising motif for the soft drinks company.
