Canidae + January Digital, Curbing Waste and Propelling Growth

Overview

In early 2022, Canidae set out to curb the reliance on single-use plastics and encourage sustainable business practices with the launch of first-of-its-kind environmentally-friendly Kibble Refill Stations. Partnering with January Digital to successfully launch the pilot program in select Southern California Petcos, Canidae was slated to expand the Kibble Refill Technology nationwide to 100 stores by EOY. Ultimately, this campaign launch needed to strongly drive in-store usage of the Kibble Refill Stations in order to scale. 

Leveraging a laser-focused approach to capture the attention of current Petco dog food customers in addition to dog-owning prospects, we focused on programmatic, digital out-of-home opportunities to raise awareness of the new-to-category way to buy dog food.

• Harnessing multiple formats that best-align with target audiences and affinities of similar, waste-reducing products, such as Electric Vehicle charging stations. 
  
• Through data integration with PlaceIQ, January Digital surgically developed a pragmatic out-of-home presence to prioritize screens that over-index for dog park and pet store visitors based on mobile device data within the target demographic against nearby Petco locations during peak business hours/traffic patterns.  
  

Throughout the campaign, January Digital was able to effectively optimize the media strategy to strongly drive each channel’s result, while dashboards enabled visibility into media spend/engagement against in-store sales to directly correlate business results to media.

Challenges

As Canidae’s strategic media partner, January Digital, needed to evaluate the ad products that highlighted visual media components to increase the likelihood and impact on consumer attention and understanding of this new campaign/product roll-out in such a crowded space.

Since the Kibble Refill Station was a new product, they wanted to ensure that consumers were able to fully comprehend the benefits and visually see it in action. Not only was awareness important in this campaign, but also the education was paramount in order for Canidae to attract the optimal consumer to this new way of buying dog food. In addition, programmatic digital programs often increase the quantity of asset sizes that necessitated close collaboration with internal creative teams and vendors to scale final deliverables based on initial concepts in order to reduce days-to-execute and strapped resources.

Results

Canidae’s Kibble Refill Station launch was a resounding success. With our deep understanding of the target audience and the digital media landscape exceeded the clients’ expectations. The digital out-of-home campaign specifically:

• Increased average weekly store sales by nearly 5x
• Drove 146% in-store visitation lift at Petco locations as measured by the media foot traffic lift study
• 50% of the kibble refill station customers were new-to-brand Canidae buyers, a far greater new-to-brand share than stores without the refill stations.