Felix Tells Cat Owners Exactly How to Please Their Pets
Felix's 'How to Please Your Cat' is a digital film published in the United Kingdom in June 2015, in which the brand's iconic black-and-white cat methodically rejects a series of well-intentioned gifts — including a cat gym, a plush bed, and an assortment of toys — delivered with warmth by a human companion, only to be met with supreme feline indifference and subversion.
The campaign operates within the House and Garden category and targets cat owners across the UK market who recognise, with affectionate frustration, the gap between what they provide for their pets and what those pets actually deign to appreciate. Felix has long anchored its brand identity to this behavioural truth: that cats are autonomous, mischievous, and impossible to fully please — except, the brand implies, through the right food. The 2015 film extends that positioning into a purely digital format, comprising a single media asset designed for online distribution and audience sharing.
In the United Kingdom, Felix stood as one of the most commercially significant cat-food brands of the mid-2010s. The campaign arrived at a moment of genuine commercial momentum for the brand, reinforcing the character-driven narrative that had defined Felix's advertising since its relaunch era. By centering the film on recognisable, relatable feline behaviour — the rejection of the cat gym being a particularly sharp comic beat — Felix invites cat owners to laugh at their own experience while keeping the brand's personality front and centre. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 64 out of 100.
Felix occupied a position of genuine competitive strength in the United Kingdom by the time 'How to Please Your Cat' appeared in June 2015. According to reporting by The Grocer, Felix overtook its principal rival Whiskas in 2015, reaching approximately £252 million in sales — a rise of 9.4% — while Whiskas declined by 14.5% to £212.9 million across the 52 weeks ending 15 August 2015. Those two brands together represented at least £464.9 million in branded cat-food sales in the UK market, according to The Grocer, illustrating the scale of the category and the intensity of the competition Felix was navigating.
Felix's strategic rationale for a digital-first campaign in 2015 reflects a wider shift in how fast-moving consumer goods brands were reaching pet owners in the United Kingdom. Rather than competing on ingredient claims or nutritional messaging — the conventional terrain of food and drink advertising — Felix consistently elected to compete on character and narrative. The brand's mischievous black-and-white cat is not a mascot in the conventional sense; it is a behavioural archetype that cat owners recognise immediately. The 2015 film sharpens that archetype by placing the cat in a domestic scenario loaded with familiar objects — the cat gym, the plush bed, the toy — and allowing its indifference to do the comedic work.
Felix's As Good as It Looks single-serve range generated more than £126 million in sales, according to The Grocer, suggesting that the brand's investment in personality-driven advertising was producing tangible returns in the UK market. Against a backdrop of declining performance from Whiskas, Felix's choice to invest in shareable digital content rather than conventional broadcast formats reads as a deliberate attempt to build emotional equity with a digitally engaged cat-owning audience.
Gary Willis directed 'How to Please Your Cat,' bringing a light observational touch to the challenge of staging genuinely funny feline behaviour within a domestic setting. The film's premise is structurally simple — a human presents increasingly elaborate gifts to a black-and-white cat, each one refused or subverted with characteristic feline aplomb — but the execution required considerable production care to land the comedy with the timing it demands.
Cinematography was handled by cameraman Richard Pullar, with Gary Smith serving as cameraman assistant, ensuring the visual language remained intimate and domestic rather than glossy or artificial. The decision to keep the production grounded in a recognisable home environment serves the narrative directly: cat owners in the United Kingdom watching the film are meant to see their own living rooms, their own cat gyms, their own failed attempts at feline appeasement. Actress Kelly Watts appears on screen as the well-meaning human companion whose gifts go unappreciated, grounding the mischief in a human emotional register that the audience can share.
The involvement of cat trainer Charlotte Wilde and veterinarians Trevor Farrell and Rachel Homeny signals the production's commitment to working responsibly and effectively with its animal talent. Coaxing a cat to perform specific rejection behaviours — dismissing a cat gym, ignoring a plush bed — on cue is a genuinely demanding production challenge, and the presence of professional animal handlers reflects the seriousness with which the team approached the craft. The agency behind the campaign has not been publicly disclosed. The film was distributed as a single digital media asset, designed for online viewing and social sharing, consistent with the content strategies that food and drink brands across the UK market were adopting in 2015.
No independently verified performance data for 'How to Please Your Cat' is publicly available from a named third-party analytics source. The Clapboard archive notes that the film generated more than 1.3 million views, though no platform breakdown, measurement date range, geographic qualification, or independent verification accompanies that figure. It is therefore treated here as an indicative claim rather than a confirmed metric.
Structurally, however, the campaign carries meaningful effectiveness signals. Felix's choice to build the entire film around a single, instantly legible behavioural truth — that cats reject the gifts humans buy them — gives 'How to Please Your Cat' the kind of immediate shareability that digital food and drink campaigns in the United Kingdom were actively pursuing in 2015. The cat gym sequence, in particular, functions as a comedic peak that rewards sharing because it externalises an experience almost every cat owner has had.
The campaign's reliance on a single media asset, rather than a multi-format or multi-platform rollout, suggests a focused distribution strategy built around organic reach and social amplification rather than paid saturation. That approach aligns with Felix's broader brand positioning: a brand confident enough in its character — the mischievous black-and-white cat — to let the narrative carry the film without additional creative scaffolding. In the context of the UK cat-food market, where Felix had just surpassed Whiskas in sales according to The Grocer, the film reads less as a growth driver and more as a brand equity investment, reinforcing the personality that had made Felix the category leader.
Felix's 'How to Please Your Cat' is a digital film published in the United Kingdom in June 2015. It features the brand's mischievous black-and-white cat dismissing gifts including a cat gym, a plush bed, and toys. The film uses feline indifference as a comic device to reinforce Felix's long-running character-driven brand narrative.
Gary Willis directed the Felix 'How to Please Your Cat' film in 2015. Richard Pullar served as cameraman, with Gary Smith as cameraman assistant. Actress Kelly Watts appeared on screen, while cat trainer Charlotte Wilde and veterinarians Trevor Farrell and Rachel Homeny supported the animal production work.
The agency behind Felix's 'How to Please Your Cat' campaign has not been publicly disclosed. The film was published in the United Kingdom in June 2015 as a single digital media asset. Felix's broader advertising heritage in the UK market includes a long association with character-driven campaigns built around its iconic black-and-white cat.
Felix reached approximately £252 million in UK sales in 2015, a rise of 9.4%, according to The Grocer, overtaking rival Whiskas, which declined 14.5% to £212.9 million. Felix's As Good as It Looks single-serve range alone generated more than £126 million in sales, according to The Grocer, in the same period.
Felix's 'How to Please Your Cat' holds a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100. The score reflects Clapboard's editorial assessment of the campaign's creative and strategic qualities. The film earns credit for its clear narrative focus and character consistency but is limited by its single-asset format and unverified performance data.
The cat gym functions as a recognisable symbol of well-meaning human effort that cats reliably ignore. Felix's 2015 UK film builds its humour around objects cat owners genuinely purchase, making the mischief immediately relatable. That recognition is central to Felix's brand strategy of dramatising authentic feline behaviour rather than aspirational pet-care scenarios.
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