Hill’s Pet Nutrition
Social Surprises
Using Social to Surprise and Delight
Part of VML’s social strategy for Hill’s Pet Nutrition was to provide followers with personalized moments that would endear them to the brand, rewarding the most loyal fans with special treatment.
Custom Hill’s Bag Wallpapers
Give ’Em What They Want
Hill’s social media accounts regularly received requests from followers to have their pets featured on Hill’s bags. While Scott and the social media team couldn’t give everyone real bags, he devised the next best thing: custom mobile wallpapers featuring users’ pets on Hill’s bags.
Scott created the design along with a Photoshop action that allowed the team to quickly replace the pet on a bag with any user’s photo.
Send Out the Call
Scott created these fun assets to let followers know about the promotion, asking for submissions to get their very own personalized wallpaper.
Over the course of just a few hours, Scott created more than 65 custom wallpapers for Hill’s social followers.
Celebrations All Around
Hill’s followers loved the activation. Scott designed this Story post to let them know when the team was done taking requests for the day.
During the activation, daily engagement increased by 486%, with 238 inquiries and 60 comments requesting custom bags, compared to a typical daily volume of 5–10 inquiries and approximately 8 comments.
Hill’s Pattern Wallpapers
Time for Round Two
After the success of the Pet Bag Wallpapers, Hill's was eager to implement this type of activation again. For the second round, the team decided that the only thing better than having your pet on your lock screen would be seeing multiple versions of your pet there.
Using the same techniques, Scott created a brand-new wallpaper that used illustration to reinforce the Hill’s brand while showcasing multiple versions of each user’s pet.
Hill’s Meme Day
I Can Has Memes
As fun as the lock screen wallpapers were, Scott and the team wanted to expand on the types of custom content they could provide their followers.
An upcoming nonsensical holiday, Meme Day, provided just such an opportunity. Scott and his team created meme templates based on silly photos of the team's own pets, and invited followers to share their own pet photos for the team to meme.
These intentionally broke from Hill’s established brand look in order to align with the type of content social users expect from meme culture. Demonstrating that Hill’s understood and could authentically participate in this space was key to the activation’s success.
All Hands on Deck
Unlike previous activations, which were primarily visual, this one required a significant amount of conceptual copywriting. Scott and his team took over a large conference room, inviting the broader creative team to collaborate on developing meme concepts.
A Lasting Influence
These meme style posts proved so popular that Hill's agreed to incorporate this style into the regular cadence of posts moving forward. Their popularity is a testament to the “test and learn” strategies that Scott championed while leading the team.