Smalls makes ‘cat’ a personality type in New York campaign

Cat food brand Smalls has stopped advertising to cat owners and started advertising to people who behave like cats. Is Cat, the New York brand’s largest campaign so far, drops the single endline entirely in favour of a fill-in-the-blank construction: something, anything, “is cat”. Solitude is cat. Read receipts is cat. A dirty martini is cat. Irish exiting is cat.

The point is to make “cat” a temperament rather than a pet: independent, selective, quietly pleased with itself. That flips the usual pet-food move, which is to show an adorable animal and let the owner supply the feeling. It also sidesteps the sentimentality that dogs have monopolised, and it gives the brand a phrase strangers can finish themselves.

Smalls built the campaign in-house rather than appointing an agency, working with production company Chico Studio and photographer Paul Yem, according to Creative Review, which first reported it. The media is deliberately physical and deliberately local: hand-painted murals, billboards and wheatpaste installations across New York through September, with some out-of-home running into October. There is also a one-night, invite-only exhibition in the city hosted by the artist Chloe Wise, where the campaign artwork is hung as work in its own right.

The commercial logic is straightforward. Smalls, which launched in 2017 selling human-grade cat food, says US cat households have grown from around 27 million in 1996 to 49 million in 2025. That figure is the brand’s own research rather than an independent count, but the direction of travel is not in dispute, and cats have long been under-served by a category that spends most of its money on dogs.

For marketers, the interesting bit is the architecture, not the joke. A flexible verbal system beats a fixed endline when the work has to stretch across a mural, a wheatpaste, a social post and a gallery wall, because each execution can be specific to its site while the structure stays identical. Build a sentence people can complete, and the audience does your line extensions for free.