Rover’s Playful Pets Show How to Sell Apps

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Pet care app Rover – which organises short- and long-term pet sitters tailored to an individual pet’s needs – launched its “We Get Your Pet” campaign last year with agency Orchard Creative. The ads were successful enough that they’re back for another round for 2026. As is often the case, familiarity breeds contentment and the new set of ads, with a warmer tone, is a huge success with audiences.

For an app advertisement, Rover takes an unusual approach. There’s no shots of screens or swiping, and the 30-second spot focuses instead on the individuals Rover is helping: the pets themselves. The idea behind “We Get Your Pet” is that a pet sitter has to be aware of each pet’s idiosyncracies and little obsessions – the one toy a dog won’t be without, for instance. A sitter should know what makes your pet happy as well as you do.

This particular ad stars Cookie the Cat, whose great passion in life is bubbles. She will happily sit for hours pawing at, chasing or just watching soap bubbles float through her room, and the ad shows her doing that before pulling back to show the Rover pet sitter blowing the bubbles to Cookie.

In other words the ad cuts through any discussion of features or emotion-killing app screenshots to get to the emotional benefit of using Rover. Cookie’s owner knows that when they’re away, Cookie isn’t just being looked after, she’s doing the things she loves. And that reassurance is worth more than any discussion of features and offers.

Sure enough, Rover’s ad scores very strongly on our Test Your Ad platform. In fact it’s in the top 1% of all Mobile App ads on both our short-term Spike Rating and long-term Star Rating – this is an excellent ad for performance and brand-building measures. The “We Get Your Pet” campaign has also given the Rover brand its first 4-Star ads in five years and its highest ever Brand Fluency score of 90% and 91% – this is strong branding as well as a very effective emotional ad.

Cookie’s adorable bubble fixation is only part of the story of why the ad’s so good, though. There’s also the connection between pet and petsitter which gives the ad its emotional peak. And there’s the consistency factor too, with Rover investing in a campaign over time to build up an asset and creative idea – we’d expect to see the campaign perform even better as it continues from year to year.

The lesson for Mobile App brand owners wanting to make distinctive ads is to find the emotional benefit people get from your brand and focus on communicating that. By letting us get to know one pet and her playful habits Rover and Orchard Creative are showing us how they’ll care about every pet.