Fame, Feeling, And Furriness with Pets at Home

British people love their pets. I mean, they really love their pets.

The UK’s pet owners will foot any bill, forgive any mischief, indulge any whim if it keeps their furry, feathery or finny friends happy.

Britain’s collective love of pets is equal parts beautiful and absurd. And leading pet retailer Pets at Home know it. Their “We’re all for pets” ad, made with agency The&Partnership, is a bombastic, brilliant epic which gets to poke gentle fun at pet owners’ extremes of devotion while simultaneously being 100% on their side.

From a goldfish funeral to an exceptionally pampered cat, “We’re all for pets” celebrates pets’ role at the centre of our lives. Do pet owners go over the top? Of course, and in this ad Pets at Home goes right there with them.

Behind this joyful ad is a complex bit of strategic and insight work, executed by Pets at Home with The&Partnership and branding agency Nomad. The brand is strengthening the ties between the retail, rehoming, veterinary and pet grooming aspects of its business. It’s bringing these strands together into a more unified identity, centred on ‘Pets’ and driven by insights around British people’s love for them. The ad is designed to launch this brand refresh.

Wisely, Pets at Home don’t waste time explaining all this to their audience. A good brand refresh should feel intuitive, after all, so Pets at Home use their ad to make viewers feel how the different parts of their business are connected by an outsize love for pets.

We see a mouse saved on an operating table, a couple buying their daughter a rat, and a naughty dog who needs some serious grooming after getting rather too involved with house redecoration. In this way the ad covers the vet, retail and grooming parts of the business, all in the same larger-than-life but very human way.

Being an ad all about the human-animal bond, there’s a whole lot of between-ness and non-verbal communication in the mix. But the real right-brain masterstroke in the ad is its choice of music. Meat Loaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love” isn’t just lyrically on point for the Pets at Home positioning, the song’s preposterous, larger-than-life feel is a brilliant match for the tone of the ad.

It’s what enables Pets at Home to take viewers on a real emotional rollercoaster of an ad – there are significant peaks of sadness and even a pet death – and still leave them smiling at the end. The ad scores 4.8-Stars on our Test Your Ad database, one of the brand’s top results. It’s a lovely example of how strategy and execution mix, with a bold, simple positioning getting the creative treatment it deserves.