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How Whiskas Mapped the World Through a Cat's Eyes in Russia
Whiskas launched 'Curious Destinations' in Russia in May 2019, an integrated campaign created by BBDO Moscow that reframed the ordinary domestic apartment as a series of named feline exploration destinations, hosted on an interactive map at CatDay.ru and accompanied by a video component.
The campaign's central mechanic placed Russian cat owners inside an apartment rendered entirely from a cat's perspective. Visitors to CatDay.ru could navigate an interactive map populated with invented geographic destinations — 'Wardroberest,' 'Armchairburg,' and 'Sleepdinia' — each translating a mundane piece of household furniture into a fully realised territory worthy of exploration. The naming convention borrowed the grammar of travel destinations and applied it to the private, enclosed world that every domestic cat inhabits. Participation in the map also unlocked entry into a competition offering cat owners the chance to win a trip, extending engagement beyond passive viewing into an active promotional mechanic.
The strategic premise was to connect Whiskas with the natural curiosity of cats rather than position the brand purely as a food provider. In Russia, where Mars Petcare operates Whiskas as a mass-market cat-food brand, this representational shift — from product to personality — carried meaningful differentiation value in the FMCG pets category. The campaign was an integrated execution comprising two media assets, as documented by adsoftheworld.com, and was subsequently recognised as a finalist in the Seasonal Marketing category at the Effie Awards Russia 2020. Clapboard rates this campaign 63 out of 100, reflecting a creative concept of clear originality that is constrained by limited publicly available evidence of measurable market impact.
Whiskas built 'Curious Destinations' on a single, well-observed behavioural truth. Cats do not experience an apartment as a confined space — they experience it as territory, as landscape, as a series of micro-environments each carrying its own meaning and risk. BBDO Moscow's strategic contribution was to treat that feline interiority not as a metaphor but as a literal cartographic fact, translating it into a navigable digital artefact that Russian cat owners could explore on behalf of their pets.
The competitive context in which this strategy was deployed matters. Mars Petcare, Whiskas's parent company, competed in the Russian cat-food FMCG segment against Nestlé Purina PetCare and Hill's Pet Nutrition, as documented across industry sources including whobrands.com and Grand View Research. In a category where most brand communication defaults to nutrition claims and product format, a campaign centred on cats' psychological relationship with domestic space represented a deliberate move away from functional messaging. The interactive map format amplified this by transforming engagement from passive reception into active participation — users did not watch the campaign, they inhabited it.
The timing of the launch in May 2019 aligned with seasonal uplift in pet-category spending, and the Effie Awards Russia 2020 finalist status in the Seasonal Marketing category confirms that this alignment was intentional and recognised by industry juries. The choice of a dedicated campaign domain, CatDay.ru, rather than a brand microsite or social channel, further signals a commitment to building a self-contained world rather than simply extending an existing brand property. MediaCom partnered with BBDO Moscow on the campaign's media planning and distribution, broadening the reach of the interactive experience across the Russian market.
The interactive map at CatDay.ru is the campaign's primary creative artefact. BBDO Moscow constructed a digital apartment interior navigable from a cat's sightline — low angles, heightened attention to vertical surfaces, and an emphasis on the dark recesses and elevated platforms that define feline spatial experience. The fictional destination names — 'Wardroberest,' 'Armchairburg,' and 'Sleepdinia' — operated simultaneously as wordplay, as geography, and as an implicit invitation to cat owners to see their own homes differently.
The naming system deserves particular attention as a piece of copywriting craft. Each destination compound fuses a domestic object with a geographic suffix drawn from recognisable real-world place-name conventions, producing names that feel both invented and entirely plausible as locations within a cat's internal atlas. The effect is gently comic but not trivial — the humour rests on genuine observation of how cats assign territorial significance to objects that humans treat as purely functional. This is narrative precision, not surface whimsy.
A video component accompanied the interactive map, extending the campaign's reach into broadcast and social contexts and providing a linear storytelling frame for audiences who encountered the brand outside the CatDay.ru environment. The integrated format — interactive digital experience plus video — allowed the campaign to operate at two levels of engagement simultaneously: deep immersive participation for committed users and accessible narrative summary for broader audiences. Production credits for 'Curious Destinations' are not publicly documented beyond the confirmed agency attribution to BBDO Moscow and media partnership with MediaCom, as reported by adsoftheworld.com and confirmed in Clapboard's own records. The campaign was submitted to the adsoftheworld.com archive and comprises two formally logged media assets.
No verified sales performance data or independently audited reach metrics for 'Curious Destinations' are publicly available. The absence of published results is consistent with standard practice for FMCG integrated campaigns in the Russian market during this period, where proprietary brand tracking data is rarely released into the public domain.
The campaign's industry standing is, however, a matter of record. 'Curious Destinations' reached finalist status at the Effie Awards Russia 2020 in the Seasonal Marketing category, as confirmed by Effie Awards Russia documentation. Effie recognition is awarded on the basis of demonstrated effectiveness, making this the strongest available proxy for campaign performance in the absence of published metrics.
Structurally, the campaign exhibits several features associated with high-engagement interactive work. The dedicated domain CatDay.ru created a measurable owned environment, implying the campaign team had access to session, navigation, and competition-entry data, even if those figures were not publicly disclosed. The competition mechanic — offering a trip as a prize — provided a direct incentive for participation and an organic data-capture mechanism. The combination of interactive map and video asset gave the campaign two distinct activation channels with different engagement depths, a structure that generally improves total campaign reach without fragmenting the core creative idea. In the Russian FMCG pets category in 2019, this level of digital integration was not ubiquitous, giving Whiskas and BBDO Moscow a degree of category distinctiveness that the Effie jury's recognition implicitly validates.
Whiskas launched 'Curious Destinations' in Russia in May 2019. Created by BBDO Moscow, the integrated campaign featured an interactive map on CatDay.ru that renamed apartment locations — 'Wardroberest,' 'Armchairburg,' 'Sleepdinia' — from a cat's perspective, inviting Russian cat owners to explore and enter a competition.
BBDO Moscow created 'Curious Destinations' for Whiskas. MediaCom partnered on media planning and distribution. The campaign was an integrated execution comprising two media assets and was launched in Russia in May 2019 as part of a seasonal marketing push for the Whiskas brand, owned by Mars Petcare.
The CatDay.ru interactive map featured three named fictional destinations. 'Wardroberest,' 'Armchairburg,' and 'Sleepdinia' each reframed a domestic furniture item as a distinct feline territory. The naming convention borrowed geographic suffix conventions to render ordinary household objects as places worthy of a cat's dedicated exploration and territorial interest.
'Curious Destinations' reached finalist status at the Effie Awards Russia 2020 in the Seasonal Marketing category. Effie recognition is based on demonstrated effectiveness, making this the strongest publicly available indicator of the campaign's performance in the Russian FMCG pets market during 2019.
Clapboard rates 'Curious Destinations' 63 out of 100. The score reflects a genuinely original creative concept — reimagining the domestic apartment as a navigable cat-perspective destination map — constrained by the absence of publicly available performance metrics to substantiate the campaign's measurable commercial impact in Russia.
Whiskas shifted brand communication away from functional nutrition claims. Rather than competing directly with Nestlé Purina PetCare and Hill's Pet Nutrition on product attributes, the 'Curious Destinations' narrative linked Whiskas to cats' natural curiosity and territorial behaviour, giving the brand a distinct emotional identity within Russia's FMCG pets category.
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