Dreamies Cat Borrowers Shows How One Shake Changes Everything
Dreamies 'All It Takes Is A Shake: Cat Borrowers' is a 2019 United Kingdom television and online video campaign, created by adam&eveDDB for Mars Petcare's Dreamies cat-treat brand, built on the insight that shaking a packet of Dreamies is enough to attract any cat, even one that belongs to someone else.
The campaign launched in January 2019 across the United Kingdom, with archival publication confirmed in February 2019, as documented by Clapboard. Its central creative platform, 'All It Takes Is A Shake,' positioned the distinctive rattle of a Dreamies packet as a near-magical trigger for feline attention. Rather than speaking exclusively to existing cat owners, the campaign extended its audience to include people without cats of their own — individuals who might use Dreamies to attract and briefly enjoy the company of a neighbour's cat. This framing introduced the concept of the 'cat borrower,' a culturally resonant character type in the United Kingdom, where urban and suburban living frequently places cat lovers in proximity to cats they do not own.
The campaign comprised three films, each featuring named feline characters, including Grandma and Roberto, as reported by LBBOnline. The named cats gave the executions a warmth and specificity that distinguished them from generic pet-food advertising, lending each film the feel of a short character study rather than a product demonstration. Television and online video served as the primary distribution channels, supported by sampling activity and point-of-sale materials in UK retail environments. Clapboard scores this campaign 60 out of 100, reflecting a well-observed consumer insight executed with charm, tempered by limited evidence of measurable commercial breakthrough.
Dreamies identified a behaviour that already existed in everyday UK life. The act of attracting a neighbour's cat is a widely recognised, if rarely acknowledged, ritual among cat lovers who live without their own pet, and adam&eveDDB built an entire brand platform around it. By naming and validating this behaviour, the campaign transformed a niche habit into a broad cultural identity, expanding the brand's addressable audience beyond the conventional cat-owner segment.
In the United Kingdom, the pet-care market has experienced sustained growth in the years surrounding this campaign. According to the British Veterinary Association, cats remain one of the most commonly kept pets in the UK, underlining the scale of the feline-owning population the campaign could reach. Dreamies competes within the indulgent cat-treat segment, a category distinct from everyday cat food, where brand personality and emotional resonance carry significant weight in purchase decisions. Principal competitors in this space include Nestlé Purina PetCare, whose Friskies and Felix-adjacent treat ranges challenge Dreamies for shelf presence, and private-label manufacturers whose lower price points place pressure on branded premium positioning.
The strategic decision to use the packet-shake sound as the campaign's core mechanic was grounded in a genuine product truth. As reported by LBBOnline, the 'All It Takes Is A Shake' platform drew directly on observed cat behaviour, giving the creative work a credibility that prevented it from feeling manufactured. By anchoring the emotional warmth of borrowed-cat relationships to a specific, repeatable product interaction, adam&eveDDB gave UK consumers a reason to associate the Dreamies brand with a moment of uncomplicated joy, rather than merely with a functional feeding occasion.
The three films at the heart of the Dreamies Cat Borrowers campaign each follow the same structural logic: a cat-less person discovers that shaking a Dreamies packet is sufficient to commandeer someone else's cat, with comic and heartfelt consequences. The named feline characters, including Grandma and Roberto, as documented by LBBOnline, were a deliberate creative choice that elevated the cats from props to protagonists, ensuring the films operated as miniature narratives rather than extended product shots.
Adweek, in coverage published on February 12, 2019, by journalist David Griner, described the executions as 'odd' and noted that the campaign framed the central concept as encouraging people to lure away neighbours' pets. That quality of slight transgression was almost certainly intentional. The comedy of the films rests on a gentle social impropriety — the cat borrower is doing something faintly cheeky — and that tension gives the advertising its texture and memorability. It is the kind of tone that DDB and adam&eveDDB have historically deployed with precision in the United Kingdom, where understatement and self-aware humour form a reliable creative register.
The production values across all three films reflect a consistent aesthetic: domestic settings, naturalistic performances, and cats behaving with the imperious indifference that audiences in the United Kingdom recognise and find reliably amusing. The casting of real cats rather than animated or heavily trained animals added an unpredictability to the performances that reinforced the brand's claim about Dreamies' irresistible appeal. Production credits for the All It Takes Is A Shake: Cat Borrowers campaign are not publicly documented beyond agency attribution to adam&eveDDB and DDB.
No verified performance data for the Dreamies All It Takes Is A Shake: Cat Borrowers campaign is publicly available in the sources consulted for this analysis. No sales uplift figures, media reach statistics, brand-tracking results, or industry award recognitions have been confirmed through Adweek, LBBOnline, or any other named source reviewed here.
Structurally, however, the campaign carries several markers of effectiveness. The 'All It Takes Is A Shake' platform is built on a product truth rather than a manufactured claim, which typically improves both credibility and memorability among UK audiences. The decision to name individual cats gave the three films a serialisable quality — a structural asset in an online video environment where audience investment in recurring characters can drive repeat viewing and earned sharing. Adweek's coverage, while framing the premise as unusual, represented meaningful trade-press attention for an FMCG pet-care campaign in a market where cut-through is competitive.
The campaign's Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100 reflects this balance. The insight is genuine, the tone is well-calibrated for the United Kingdom, and the named-cat device shows creative confidence. What prevents a higher score is the absence of a demonstrably scalable idea beyond the initial three executions and the lack of any publicly documented commercial or cultural impact metrics. The campaign is competent and charming; it does not yet have the evidence base to be called transformative.
Dreamies Cat Borrowers is a 2019 UK campaign by adam&eveDDB for Mars Petcare's Dreamies brand. It shows cat-less people using the shake of a Dreamies packet to attract neighbours' cats. The campaign launched in January 2019, ran across television and online video, and featured three films with named feline characters including Grandma and Roberto.
Adam&eveDDB, operating under the DDB network, created the campaign for Mars Petcare. The agency developed the 'All It Takes Is A Shake' platform for the United Kingdom market in 2019, building the creative work around the observed behaviour of cats responding to the sound of a shaken Dreamies packet.
Grandma and Roberto are named feline characters featured in the Dreamies Cat Borrowers films, as reported by LBBOnline. Giving individual cats names was a deliberate creative decision by adam&eveDDB to make the cats protagonists rather than props, lending each of the three UK films a character-driven narrative quality distinct from standard pet-food advertising.
Clapboard scores the Dreamies Cat Borrowers campaign 60 out of 100. The score reflects a well-observed consumer insight and confident tonal execution suited to the UK market, offset by limited publicly available evidence of measurable commercial impact and no confirmed industry award recognition in sources reviewed for this analysis.
The campaign ran on television and online video in the United Kingdom, as documented by LBBOnline. These primary channels were supported by sampling activity and point-of-sale materials in UK retail environments. The campaign comprised three film executions and launched in January 2019, with the archive record published in February 2019.
Adweek published coverage on February 12, 2019, written by journalist David Griner. Griner described the campaign executions as 'odd' and framed the creative concept as encouraging people to lure away neighbours' cats. The trade-press attention represented meaningful earned coverage for a UK FMCG pet-care campaign in a competitive advertising environment.
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