Once Upon A Time

The story is simple. ARM & HAMMERTM cat litter’s lightweight business was drowning in a sea of competitors in a category full of apathy. We needed to break through and bring storytelling to cat litter. We partnered with Moving Picture Company, the animation studio behind Disney’s 2019 The Lion King, to create our campaign “Once Upon a Time in Cat World” — a CGI desert world where a lone stranger came looking for the secret to taking care of wetness and got a litter that was more than he bargained for.

When you think about the Wild West, Eastern Europe probably isn’t what comes to mind. Nevertheless, we brought our desert world to life in Sofia, Bulgaria inside an Old West saloon working with local actors (plus a handful of real cats). The inspiration for our cat characters came from some of the greatest Westerns ever made, like High Noon, Tombstone, and Unforgiven. But our hero, Tuxedo Tom, doesn’t find himself in a classic shootout when he runs into the gruff — yet surprisingly friendly — Nine Lives Jackson, who teaches him about the power of Desert Dry MineralsTM.

In order to merge the practical with the CGI, real cats were filmed in the exact position where CGI cats would later appear to match the visual reference for light, shadow, depth of field and motion blur, and custom modeling and rigging systems created the beautifully detailed CGI cats. HDR lighting maps captured the environment as each plate was filmed and digitally shot, and then the animation was mapped onto the CGI cats. The visually stunning work helped double cat litter revenue growth in Q4, generated 2.2x earned media ROI alone, and drove positive engagement on YouTube with many of the 23million+ viewers commenting that we made ads they actually wanted to watch.