Depositphotos partnered with Israeli duo Cherie and Renno to create 'The music video with the most cats ever,' a four-minute film built from over 940 stock
ARCHIVEDepositphotos Turned 940 Stock Photos Into a Viral Cat Music Video
Depositphotos produced a branded music video titled 'The music video with the most cats ever,' published in Israel in April 2017, combining more than 940 royalty-free stock images with an original electronic track called 'Meow' by Israeli musical duo Cherie and Renno to demonstrate the creative range of its image library in a format designed for viral sharing.
The campaign belongs to the Film category within the Electronics and Technology sector. Its core mechanic is elegantly self-referential: every visual element in the video is drawn directly from the Depositphotos catalogue, making the product the medium as much as the subject. The result is a four-minute piece that functions simultaneously as a music video, a product demonstration, and a piece of internet entertainment built around the internet's most reliable cultural currency — cats.
In Israel, the campaign emerged from Leo Burnett Israel, with Shushu E. Spanier serving as copywriter, designer, and director, and Shirley Eva Bahar as art director and head of design. The named cat characters populating the video — including SuperCat, Beekeeper Cat, McFly Cat, Emo Cat, Pirate Cat, and Unicorn Cat — were each assembled from stock imagery, according to Blog Depositphotos. The campaign's dedicated website displayed 74 distinct cat characters, as documented by petguide.com, reinforcing the project's ambition to function as a standalone creative world rather than a conventional advertisement. Adweek covered the campaign positively upon its April 2017 release, with coverage preserved through a PetGuide summary published on April 26, 2017, emphasising the spectacle and novelty of the execution over any conventional product-benefit messaging. Clapboard assigns the campaign a creative-archive score of 72 out of 100.
ARCHIVEDepositphotos identified a strategic gap in how stock-content platforms communicated their value in 2017. The prevailing approach across the sector leaned on catalogue size and licensing terms — rational arguments addressed to procurement decisions rather than creative instinct. By contrast, the 'Most Cats Ever' campaign addressed the creative professional directly, demonstrating the library's versatility through an act of creativity rather than a features list.
The stock-content market was undergoing a structural shift at precisely this moment. According to weku.org and pixelz.com, the industry was transitioning away from traditional rights-managed licensing toward royalty-free and subscription-based purchasing models. Shutterstock had pioneered the subscription approach since its 2003 launch, according to pixelz.com, establishing a competitive benchmark that Depositphotos and other challengers needed to answer. Adobe Stock, one of the sector's most formidable competitors, contained more than 60 million curated assets as of August 2017, according to Blog Adobe — a scale advantage that smaller platforms could not easily match on volume alone. Against this backdrop, Depositphotos chose to compete on creative credibility rather than catalogue depth, positioning its library as a tool for genuine artistic expression.
In Israel, the choice of Cherie and Renno as collaborators was equally deliberate. The Tel Aviv-based duo brought an established audience within the local electronic music scene, lending the campaign authenticity that a purely commercial production would have lacked. The cat theme itself is not arbitrary: internet culture's sustained affection for cat content provided a distribution mechanism, giving the video a ready-made community of potential sharers far beyond Depositphotos' existing user base. The campaign distributed across Facebook and SoundCloud, platforms that in 2017 were the primary vectors for music-adjacent viral content.
Nissim Farin Shtamper served as head of VFX and editor on the production, with VFX animation credits attributed to Asaf Norani, Einat Moscovich, and Shahar Fleisher, and design support from Rotem Mark, according to Clapboard's production records. The creative challenge they collectively faced was substantial: transforming static stock photographs into fluid, character-driven animation across a four-minute runtime requires a degree of compositional discipline that is rarely visible in the finished piece but entirely responsible for its watchability.
The execution is classified as a parody and borrowed-format music video — a creative mode that works by adopting the visual grammar of a genre its audience already knows and subverting it with unexpected content. Here, the conventions of the pop music video — rapid cutting, saturated colour grading, lip-sync performance, and recurring character motifs — are applied wholesale to still imagery from the Depositphotos library. The saturated colour palette serves a dual function: it creates visual energy that sustains attention across the full runtime, and it implicitly communicates the richness of the stock catalogue itself.
The named cast of cat characters — SuperCat, Beekeeper Cat, McFly Cat, Emo Cat, Pirate Cat, and Unicorn Cat, as documented on blog.depositphotos.com — demonstrates a deliberate worldbuilding instinct. Each character represents a different corner of the catalogue, signalling variety without resorting to a conventional product gallery. The rapid editing rhythm, driven by Farin Shtamper's cut, keeps the video aligned with the tempo and energy of Cherie and Renno's electronic track 'Meow,' ensuring that the creative conceit and the musical performance reinforce each other rather than competing for attention. Shiri Davidovitch managed production, with Vadim Nekhai serving as VP of Global Business Development on the brand side, according to Clapboard's documentation.
No verified third-party performance data for 'The music video with the most cats ever' is publicly available in terms of view counts, conversion metrics, or documented business outcomes. What the public record does confirm is the nature and quality of the attention the campaign generated. Adweek's editorial coverage in April 2017 — one of advertising's most competitive gatekeeping environments — focused on the campaign's spectacle and novelty, according to a summary preserved by petguide.com on April 26, 2017. Earned coverage of this kind, particularly from a publication addressing creative and marketing professionals, is a meaningful signal of industry resonance for a platform whose primary audience is precisely that community.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on several compounding factors. The use of more than 940 Depositphotos stock images as the sole visual material, as documented by blog.depositphotos.com, turns every frame into proof-of-concept advertising — the product is not described but experienced. The cat theme provided an organic distribution mechanism, tapping an audience segment with demonstrated sharing behaviour. The collaboration with Cherie and Renno gave the campaign access to an existing fan base in Israel and the wider electronic music community. And the four-minute runtime, generous by advertising standards, allowed the creative team to build a genuine piece of entertainment rather than a branded interruption.
Clapboard assigns the campaign a score of 72 out of 100, reflecting strong creative ambition and coherent strategic logic, with room for deeper measurable impact. The campaign remains a documented reference point for stock-content brands seeking to demonstrate creative range through the work itself rather than through product-feature messaging.
Depositphotos published a branded music video in Israel in April 2017 built entirely from stock images. The four-minute film featured the song 'Meow' by Israeli duo Cherie and Renno, incorporated more than 940 Depositphotos images, and showcased named cat characters including SuperCat, Beekeeper Cat, and Emo Cat, according to blog.depositphotos.com.
Leo Burnett Israel created the campaign. Shushu E. Spanier directed, wrote copy, and designed; Shirley Eva Bahar served as art director; and Nissim Farin Shtamper led VFX and editing, according to Clapboard's production records. Israeli electronic duo Cherie and Renno composed and performed the original track 'Meow.'
The campaign's dedicated website displayed 74 distinct cat characters, as documented by petguide.com. Named characters included SuperCat, Beekeeper Cat, McFly Cat, Emo Cat, Pirate Cat, and Unicorn Cat, each assembled from Depositphotos stock imagery, according to blog.depositphotos.com. The video itself used more than 940 stock photographs in total.
Depositphotos chose to demonstrate its library through creative output rather than catalogue claims. By making every visual element from its own stock images, the campaign turned the product into the medium. Cats provided a culturally resonant distribution mechanism, and the music video format attracted earned coverage from Adweek, as summarised by petguide.com in April 2017.
Clapboard assigns the Depositphotos 'music video with the most cats ever' a creative-archive score of 72 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative ambition and coherent strategic logic in using stock imagery as both medium and message, with acknowledged scope for deeper documented audience impact.
Cherie and Renno are a Tel Aviv-based electronic music duo who composed and performed 'Meow,' the original track anchoring the Depositphotos music video, according to blog.depositphotos.com. Their involvement gave the campaign creative authenticity within the Israeli electronic music scene and extended its potential reach to an established fan audience beyond Depositphotos' existing user base.
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