Every cat owner knows that their feline friend deserves nothing but the best. Cats are notoriously fussy; serving them the wrong cat food, for example, can turn them rather cranky.

For the launch of Opti Life, a new premium brand of cat food, Versele-Laga called on our team once again. After having built a previous website for sister brand NutriBird, we were asked whether we would be able to come up with a new creative digital experience. Our challenge? To convince selective cat owners to have their cat nibble their new kibble.

In a highly competitive landscape, it is not always easy to get your target group’s attention for a new product launch. The Versele-Laga team had already put in a fair amount of prep work throughout various brainstorming sessions, in an attempt to find a high-impact market entry strategy for Opti Life. A number of ideas had already been considered – including the possible development of a fully-fledged augmented reality game that might combine a physical game board with an augmented reality layer using a smartphone camera.

In practice, we decided against an AR game. Instead, we worked out a different concept that would attract more visitors and reach a larger share of our relevant audiences. Together with Versele-Laga’s own team and Focus Advertising, we set to work on a 3D web experience. The core idea remained the same: to create as much buzz as possible with the new brand’s target audience, to secure solid opening sales for Opti Life.

We decided to settle on Cat Genius: a light-hearted, fun and interactive browser-based web story. Website visitors are in command of a 3D-modeled cat looking for its food bowl. On their quest for its freshly poured Opti Life cat food, visitors are forced to navigate a number of obstacles in the form of cat-related quiz questions, informing the audience in a playful way and establishing a relationship with potential buyers. The optional mini game, roughly halfway through the experience, serves the same purpose. This ties in with the main marketing objective to offer additional value and advice to cat owners and to position the new brand as high-quality and reliable right from the outset.

• Immersive web experience in realtime 3D.
• Clever use of WebGL technology for easy viewing on any device, across all browsers.
• Integration of mini game and quiz questions, providing light-hearted moments.
• Quiz questions, images and other content are easy to edit and replace through the content management system, allowing the Versele-Laga marketing team to deploy changes independently.

We launched simultaneously in Belgium, the Netherlands and France, using one central underlying platform to power the website. Digital experiences using WebGL often don’t get enough love by digital agencies – and at Poppr, we’re happy to use them in a creative way.

Initial reactions were overwhelmingly positive. Our target group of ‘demanding’ cat owners is easily addressed with interesting added value content, while the playful mini game offers entertainment. Mission accomplished!