Most outdoor advertising is designed to be seen by humans. Marro, a fresh cat food brand, and creative agency Wonderful Things took a different position: what if the billboard’s primary user was the cat, and the owner was simply a bystander who happened to read what was written above the claw marks?
The Campaign
The Marro Meow Competition is a search for the nation’s best cat meow, with a prize of £10,000 for the winning cat. The competition itself is straightforward. The activation built around it is not.
Wonderful Things created miniature, cat-sized billboards and installed them across London. Each billboard doubles as a functional scratching post. The structure tempts cats with the texture and height of a scratching surface. The cats scratch. The owners look up. They see the message printed above the claw marks.
The taglines are addressed directly to the cats, not their owners: “MEOWING AT 3AM? GET PAID FOR IT.” “GO HOME AND YELL AT YOUR HUMAN.” The campaign hashtag, #MeowForMarro, sits beneath each message, directing owners to the competition entry point.
The Creative Inversion
The advertising model this campaign reverses is so standard that it is almost invisible. Pet food advertising talks to owners about their pets. It describes nutritional benefits, emotional bonds, and the implicit claim that a good owner chooses this product. The owner is the decision-maker, the audience, and the person the ad is trying to persuade.
Marro’s billboards talk to the cats about their owners. The human is reduced to a bystander whose role is to notice what their cat has been doing, read the instruction above the scratch marks, and follow it. Finnegan Shepard, Senior Brand Marketing Lead at Marro, described the thinking precisely: “We wanted our next move to hand the microphone, or in this case, the billboard, to the cats.”
That framing is not just playful. It is structurally precise. The activation works because it requires the cat to physically interact with the billboard, and that interaction produces the conditions for the owner to see the message. The cat does not understand it is advertising. The owner does, and the route to that understanding runs through the scratch marks their cat has left on a billboard.
The Competition
The Marro Meow Competition invites cat owners to enter their cats for the chance to win £10,000. Entries close on September 6, 2026. The winner is announced between September 14 and 18. The celebrity judge is Kimberly Wyatt of the Pussycat Dolls, whose involvement gives the competition the pop culture hook that extends its reach beyond the cat-owner community into broader entertainment coverage.
The competition format mirrors the brand’s product philosophy. Marro sells fresh cat food, a category built on the proposition that cats deserve better than the compromises in conventional pet food. A competition that takes the cat’s meow seriously as a talent worth judging and rewarding is the same proposition translated into a brand activation.
The Broader Context
The fresh cat food category in the UK has been growing at significant pace, driven by owners who treat their pets with increasing consideration for quality, provenance, and ingredients. Marro positions itself within that category as the brand that takes cats seriously, which makes a competition with a £10,000 prize and a celebrity judge feel consistent rather than absurd.
The scratching post billboard is the campaign’s cleverest single decision because it converts a cat’s instinctive behaviour into the mechanism that delivers the advertising message. The cat does not need to be trained, directed, or managed. It does what cats do. The billboard is designed to make that natural behaviour produce the desired outcome. When a cat scratches a Marro billboard, it is completing the campaign.
Campaign Name: The Marro Meow Competition
Agency Name: Wonderful Things
Brand Name: Marro
Location: London, United Kingdom (outdoor installations; competition entry at marro.com/meow; August to September 2026)
