Nestlé Purina
CATDAQ - The world’s premier made-up stock market for the hottest trending cat videos.
Felix CATDAQ was built to tap into a new generation of cat owners – a YouTube-first campaign that turned trending cat videos into a fictional stock market, with Felix at the centre of it. A simple idea, built to sit naturally within the way content already moves online.
Lead Creative – Deep Focus / ENGINE
Concept | Art direction | Design | Writing
Background
Cat videos dominate online, but they’re rarely watched in isolation. They exist as part of a constant stream – shared, ranked, reacted to, and quickly replaced by whatever comes next.
Most brands try to insert themselves into that ecosystem, usually by adding more content into the mix. The opportunity here was slightly different – to build something that reflected how that system actually behaves, rather than competing with it.
My role
As one half of a creative pair, we led the campaign, developing the core idea and shaping how it was brought to life. personally developing in the art direction and brand of the series, as well as writing scripts and defining the tone – making sure it felt consistent, slightly ridiculous, but still coherent enough to hold together over multiple episodes.
Approach
We created CATDAQ – a fictional stock market for trending cat videos, tracking their rise and fall as if they were shares. The idea leaned into the volatility of online content, where attention spikes quickly and drops just as fast.
By turning that behaviour into a format, we gave structure to something that’s usually chaotic. It created a repeatable system that could respond to trends in real time, while still feeling like a consistent piece of content. Felix sat at the centre of that system, integrated into the format rather than interrupting it.
The results
The campaign ran for 24 episodes on YouTube, becoming the fastest-growing pet channel globally on the platform in 2015. More importantly, it created a format people came back to – not just for individual videos, but as something that evolved over time as new content moved through it.
Sadly – pets (and promotional pet channels) can’t live forever. CATDAQ is no longer live. RIP CATDAQ.