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Americans are big, big fans of pets. Big to the tune of 90.5MM households.

The folks at BISSELL are big fans of pets, too. In fact, BISSELL is the only floorcare brand with products for every stage of the pet parenthood journey, from those first pottytraining mishaps to the very smelliest of senior accidents. They figure that by making pet ownership easier, more people will open their hearts and homes to pets. In support of that mission, every product purchase helps fund BISSELL’s animal rescue efforts. –But no one knew this and that’s where we came in…

When we first started working together, BISSELL was the #3 brand in floorcare, with aspirations for more, but budgets strictly-tied to product sales. They were running demo-heavy ads that focused on suction power and other parity features because that’s what the market responds to. What we needed was an emotional campaign that could steadily push the brand apart from media-behemoths Dyson and Hoover – without sacrificing conversion.

Our formula: 90% product features + 10% brand story x tons (and tons) of iterations.

Rather than produce beautiful-but-costly brand spots, we put our budget into lots of hardworking, product-focused ads. And rather than try to out-demo Dyson, we tied our top product benefits to specific emotional moments pet parents would recognize. Like this:

Every chance we got, we connected a product’s key benefit to a pet parent moment. And we moved FAST, nimbly producing work (like the spot below, which showed BISSELL’s new robot fitting into the very sudden COVID-19 realities of a Working/Schooling/Playing-From-Home life) within 6-8 weeks, from ideation to launch.

What’s more, every product campaign was omnichannel, its storyline extending across broadcast, performance ads, and organic social – with content crafted for the medium.

While each individual piece of content was designed to satisfy a specific sales metric, taken as a whole, the work advanced our brand positioning:

No matter what stage of pet parenthood you’re in, BISSELL helps you live in the moment, not the mess.

With this steady drumbeat of ours, our clients saw historic revenue growth across all their product categories and pet parents increasingly became at-home in our brand, engaging with us on social media.

In the end, we moved BISSELL to #1 in U.S. sales.

And, do you know what’s even better than cleaning the floor with the competition or learning that the guy who directed Bridesmaids tweeted about our ad? Knowing that, in total, we impacted the lives of 409,832 pets who needed us. Pets like this one: