Since its launch in 1984, Fresh Step has been the crown jewel of Clorox’s cat litter portfolio, a segment of the CPG marketer’s business that has lagged for some time and does not command the share of the $5 billion U.S. cat litter market that executives would like. The company determined that part of the brand’s problem was heightened category pressure on its core promise around odor control.
“Perceptions of [Fresh Step] had actually started to dip. Not core perceptions — it was still good — but relative perceptions,” Eric Schwartz, CMO of The Clorox Company, said about Fresh Step during a presentation at the Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference last month.
To address those issues and reassert Fresh Step’s positioning as being superior in odor control, the brand needed a new campaign that would be memorable and engaging, but made quickly. The marketer wanted to be able to pivot easily, if needed, rather than be stuck after betting the farm on a creative concept.
“There's a real business pressure, and it was not going to be acceptable [to say] I'll come in six months with my idea,” Deb Crandall, senior marketing director on litter at The Clorox Company, said in an interview. “We need things in market ASAP.”
Fresh Step teamed with artificial intelligence-powered agency RECE — short for radical empathy and creative excellence — to go from brief to finished ad creative on three 15-second spots in 30 days and at one-tenth the cost of a traditional production (and without having to rely on finicky cat actors).
“The speed AI creates lets us bring strategy, concept, copy, direction, AI artists, editors and composers together, all at once. It’s closer to a tech startup’s prototyping process than a traditional ad agency’s,” Toygar Bazarkaya, founder and chief creative officer at RECE, said in emailed comments.
The ads are rolling out now across linear TV with cutdowns on social and will be live by Nov. 9.
“This campaign could not have existed in this way, probably even a year ago. That's how fast I think the advances [in AI] are coming,” Crandall said. “The technology unlocked some magic that wouldn't have been possible without it.”
Accelerating with AI
Fresh Step’s new ads feature a cast of talking cats of different breeds with different accents and attitudes. The spots deliver the brand’s value proposition around odor in different ways: a dog can no longer smell its way to a litter box; a huge cat is no problem for the brand; and cats line up around the block to use Fresh Step.
The brief began as usual, with a business challenge and a consumer insight. AI helped to rapidly prototype creative concepts to show what was resonating, delivering emotion in a way that a script on the page can’t always do. Being able to see talking cats in action helped convince the brand that the ads would still connect with consumers.
“One of the fears was would AI cats give you that same emotive response as when you see a real animal? I think the work does deliver on that. It captures that emotional response,” Crandall said. “That inner part of the process — being able to see it and feel it like midstream — really helped us to unlock and push us into some new spaces that we hadn't been before as a brand.”
The fact that AI-powered content creation technology is trained on an internet that is still overloaded with cat videos may make it easier for the AI-created talking cats to cross the uncanny valley than AI-created humans. And while consumers are wary of AI in ads, the Fresh Step ads are clearly computer generated.
“As consumers, we're all experimenting with this technology in our lives and figuring out how it helps us and doesn't help us,” Crandall said. “This, to me, was very clearly AI. We're not trying to fool anybody here. We're using it to dramatize situations that many cat owners can relate to.”
The speed and cost efficiency of the AI-created campaign will help Fresh Step reinvest in the brand: Getting it done at one-tenth the cost roughly equates to being able to create 10 more campaigns.
“It's always a sign when you've hooked onto something when you can already think of the next five ideas that you want to go do. We have some other things that we're thinking about creating once we get these out there and see how they resonate,” Crandall said. “It's that beautiful blend of humor and connecting to real cat-parent truths that I think is the secret sauce.”
Plus, the creativity unlocked by technology is helping the brand to extend the campaign into what CMO Schwartz referred to as systems of relevance that continuously deliver organic content.
“The deliberately modular design lets us adapt benefits, innovations, packaging, even messages based on what we will learn about consumers in market,” the executive said of the campaign at the ANA event. “That's the real advantage. This isn't a piece of creative we had to bet big on, and now we let it fly and leave it alone. We can keep learning, refining and improving as we go.”
