Famed Commie theorist Rosa Luxemburg owned a cat named Mimi. When Mimi met that prick Lenin, she is said to have initially flirted with him, rolling on her back like she wanted to play with him. But when the Soviet Supremo tried to approach her she whacked him with a paw and snarled like a tiger. Appropriate.

We knew Footloose had some of Mimi’s soul inside. But how do you make cat shit cool?

Footloose sought us out to generate media coverage for the launch of their automated kitty litter device. The PR campaign targeted a wide range of tier one media outlets including those covering pet products, technology, lifestyle, home, and AI.

Given the persistent skepticism around crowdfunding projects and a saturated pet tech market, standing out is a challenge. Due to the health-tracking nature of the product, most reporters expressed an interest in testing Footloose out over time with their own fur-babies. But with only one prototype, and thus no samples for media, we had to nail the positioning right off the bat, and rely heavily on the quality of the visual and multimedia assets to showcase the product in action.

As we’ve seen many times before, PR campaigns without demo roadshows and review units can still get media coverage if the product is sufficiently cool and/or quirky and it’s highly differentiated from other products in the space. Because there were other self-cleaning litter boxes on the market, part of the communications strategy was to clearly address the pain points of competitor products based on customer feedback. Footloose had a strong start out of the gate ($50,000 raised in one hour), which we also leveraged for PR to generate further media interest.

Even without test-driving the tech, media simply did not want to miss their chance to report on this sci-fi shit box once they got a teaser.  Dubbed  a “Fitbit for your cat shit” by Digital Trends, Footloose had a long list of impressive features.. The device’s health tracking capability, coupled with its self-cleaning, user friendly design was hard for reporters to  resist. There was a torrent of coverage and in the end Footloose raised $1.3 million, becoming the most funded pet product in Kickstarter history.

At launch, we generated over 50 total media placements, scoring coverage in top tier tech and lifestyle publications like Digital Trends, CNET, Engineering.com and TechRadar.