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When promotions in the pet supplies category look the same, it becomes increasingly difficult to capture the audience’s attention with discounts. For E-ZOO, we sought a solution that would both differentiate the brand from its competitors and deliver measurable performance results. This led to the creation of PromoStick, a mechanism that transformed online shopping into a genuine brand experience.

Goals

The pet supplies category is one of the most competitive in e-commerce, where standard promotions and discounts quickly lose their effectiveness. The main task was to increase sales in the dog supplies category and attract new customers to E-ZOO, while strengthening the brand’s position in a saturated environment.

To do this, we set a goal to create an interactive ecosystem of online touchpoints with the brand, increase reach and awareness among pet owners, achieve at least 2,000 PromoStick activations, and ensure a direct business result — growth in sales of dog products on the E-ZOO website.

The challenge

Pets have long been more than just animals. They are full-fledged members of the family. We love them dearly, spoil them with the best food, and buy stylish leashes and soft beds. Anything to make our furry friends happy.

This has led to rapid growth in the pet products market: in 2024, the pet products market in Ukraine reached UAH 45.4 billion and is one of the largest and fastest growing. For the fourth year in a row, annual turnover growth has been 15-30% (RAU, Pet Products Market Research, 2024). But along with growth, competition is also intensifying: online, most of the market is divided between large players, which creates a significant barrier to the development of smaller brands such as E-ZOO.

Marketing in this category is mostly focused on similar promotions and discounts, which makes brands less distinct from each other and distracts the audience’s attention. In such an environment, the key challenge was not just to offer another discount, but to stand out from the endless promotional catalog, attract the attention of pet owners, and build an emotional connection with the brand — in a way that would directly impact sales.

Insight and strategy

Dogs instinctively love the game “fetch the stick” — it’s a simple gesture that brings them joy and strengthens their bond with their owner. At the same time, pet parents in the digital world behave in a similar way: they are constantly looking for the best for their pets (great deals, promo codes, promotions). We saw a parallel: searching for a stick and searching for the best offer are almost the same behavior, only in different manifestations.

Based on this insight, we built a strategy: to transfer the favorite game of “fetch” to the digital world and turn the search for discounts into an interactive experience of interacting with the brand. This is how E-ZOO’s digital PromoStick came about — an online mechanism that combined the instincts of dogs and the rationality of pet owners and gave the brand the opportunity to stand out in the category not by the size of the discount, but by the format of contact.

Execution

First, our creative team developed the concept of offline PromoSticks — they collected real sticks, put smart messages and promo codes on them, and returned them to city parks. Dogs found the sticks during walks and brought them to their owners, who discovered discounts on food, toys, and other products for their pets. The idea instantly evoked an emotional response and organically engaged the audience with the brand.

Seeing the high level of audience engagement and interest, we scaled the mechanics to digital. To do this, we optimized the UX and integrated the digital PromoStick directly into the E-ZOO website — into the landing page, catalog, product cards, advertising, etc. Users could find promos at various points along the way, receiving alternative commercial offers in the form of promo codes integrated into performance campaigns: from contextual advertising to search campaigns, social networks, and retention mechanics.

This turned shopping into a game and a quest: you go in for cat food and suddenly find a digital stick with a promo code. Unexpected, exciting, and profitable at the same time.

As a result, our PromoStick ceased to be just a promotion — we built a full-fledged ecosystem of channels around the game with sticks. Offline sticks became the entry point, organic sharing on social media and influencers increased reach, search and social media advertising drove new audiences to the site, and CRM communications maintained interest and stimulated repeat purchases.

Results

PromoStick integrated into the user journey and allowed the emotional idea to be scaled into measurable business results. The campaign accurately targeted the audience and captured the attention of more than 1.6 million pet owners. The game mechanics increased engagement — CTR rose significantly, and conversion (CR) grew substantially, especially among new customers.

• promo During the 12-day promo, we attracted 2,267 sales using PromoStick, which accounted for almost 40% of all sales in the “Dog Products” category and 26% of E-ZOO’s entire product range.
• With an increase in the advertising budget of only 13%, we managed to attract 45.8% more sales in the Dog Products category, which generated +49.6% revenue. In other words, the average user check was even higher than usual.

At the same time, our “zoo creative” helped draw the attention of new customers to E-ZOO. We attracted a larger audience new to the brand, which led to a 61.5% increase in sales to new customers. PromoStick is an example of performance marketing that makes a campaign both emotional and effective, turning the game into real business results for the brand.

In 2022 Visa, like other responsible brands, reevaluated its priorities, focusing efforts and resources on support. The company created a non-commercial platform that served as a forum for the coordinated efforts of Visa’s social initiatives and its partners, arising in response to numerous simultaneous needs.

The establishment of the Brands Who Care enabled the consolidation of media channels, businesses, foundations, and those needing assistance for effective aid and support. Visa directed its communication investments to support the platform, emphasizing timely messages on areas requiring immediate assistance. The campaign was created by the Saatchi & Saatchi Ukraine team.

To achieve maximum visibility, the initiatives were presented as Brands who care, rather than directly under the Visa name, which facilitated more effective interaction with the audience. The project garnered significant reach, with over 50,000,000 contacts.

Since the launch of the first collaborations, over 20 initiatives have been organized, and over 80 million hryvnias have been raised. Brands who care community continue to thrive and evolve as a community of socially responsible brands.

Selling OTC pharmaceuticals online is one of the most challenging ventures in performance marketing. However, with the advent of Covid-19, we identified a potential opportunity. Specifically, we anticipated a surge in online sales and a transition of users from offline to online platforms.

We took the initiative to become market pioneers, establishing the most transparent and effective collaboration with online retailers. We successfully launched Performance Marketing for Sandoz drugs, transforming the Black Box Pharma eRetail Media market into a clear, comprehensible, real-time analytical system. This allows for clear tracking of our advertising campaigns’ business results and boosts sales by attracting new users.

Podorozhnyk is one of the TOP-5 pharmacy chains in Ukraine. The brand is growing rapidly, therefore, it needs an update that would reflect its fresh essence, advantages, and values.

The Publicis Ukraine team has rethought the brand identity and key message for the new Podorozhnyk. This is how the slogan appeared: “Podorozhnyk. Knows that helps”. It is based on two main brand advantages. On one hand, the brand has the necessary competencies, knowledge, experience, and resources to tell the client which drugs would be helpful in a specific case. On the other hand, Podorozhnyk cares about its client, offering high-quality drugs with no fakes. Also provides regular discount programs: “Quality available to everyone”, and provides additional services such as “Doctor at the pharmacy” etc.

Then the agency team updated the logo. Over the past years, Podorozhnyk has managed to build brand awareness, so when working with the visual component, it was important to maintain continuity, while reflecting updates and modernizing it. Thus, the recognizable medical cross and plantain leaf were visually rethought in the main green color. They merged into a single entity, where the significant element of the sign is linked to the corresponding word in the logo by color: the cross to the word pharmacy and the leaf to the Podorozhnyk. The logo has become concise and simple to understand, and the font has become lighter, neater, and more open.

This is a showcase of how Lenovo, a hi-tech electronics brand, thinks not only about the functional features of its products, but also takes care of both product usage conditions and client’s comfort.

Creating of Lenovo Meowbook – laptop for cats – added more emotions into the user-brand relationships as well as highlighting such a problem as ‘device damaging from cat’s fur’ which became communicative innovation in this category.

Virus orientation, originality, and non-standard merging of high technologies and additional customer care allowed Lenovo to be organically discussed in media and got 9.5 million impressions.

The Ukrainian Creative Awards festival took place in Odesa from May 29 to June 1. It is a large-scale event in the creative market of the country, which brings together the most ideological and inspired creative people. Creativity is their natural way of life, so we believe that such people are the real driving force that can change the world. Thus was born our idea for the advertising campaign of the festival “Creativity — Ukrainian national idea”, thanks to which the creative flair in itself could be discovered and supported by everyone.

Casting Crème Gloss as a historical leader in ammonia-free hair dyes has always been positioned as a brand for the first dyeing. Our focus audience is girls younger than 35 years old because hair color without ammonia does not suit older women. But since the launch, the audience of the brand became much older and we did not attract girls aged 16-24 y.o. who color their hair for the first time.

The main goal is to use upcoming rebranding and consider a strategy that would help to attract the new audience’s attention without losing the existing one and stimulate the brand growth.

Analyzing two TA segments (F 16-24 and F 25-34), we realized that each of them has a completely different background. Therefore, we built our communication taking into account individual triggers. The right message helped rejuvenate the audience and strengthen the perception of Casting Crème Gloss as the best dye for the first coloring.

In just a month of the campaign, we have achieved a record market share since the brand existed.

We faced a challenge to break into the everyday life of people with a new product Kabanosy – long, thin sausages made from natural meat, positioned in between the meat-sausage and snack category. Until 2019 the product was unknown to both Ukrainian customers and distributors. Retail shops didn’t understand in which division the product should be sold, customers were puzzled whether to make sandwiches or eat Kabanosy with beer.

New product inspired us for a new approach for mixing media channels. We turned the classical media mix upside down and developed “DigiVision”, where digital plays a leading role in generating reach and TV is playing a secondary role. Non-standard and effective usage of media allowed Kabanosy to become a leader of the category of Snack and Meat products with minimal investment and significantly grew monthly sales.