DESTRUCTION-TEST PRODUCT FOOTAGE
Creative Strategy · Competitor Intelligence · Creative Production
Using Outers’ competitor intelligence to study how the durable dog-toy category was actually winning on Meta, we found nearly every brand, Kong included, was competing on the same single axis: how hard can your dog try to destroy this before it wins. Nobody was addressing the moment after that, when a toy finally does wear out and ends up in a landfill. We built West Paw’s creative strategy around that gap: pair the destruction-test proof the category already knows converts with the one claim nobody else can make, a real recycling loop for the toys that don’t survive. Every recommended test led with toughness, then closed on responsibility.
Every recommendation was generated through our internal creative intelligence system. Instead of starting with assumptions, we analyzed competitor ads, market signals, and performance patterns to identify the highest-opportunity creative direction.
Durability claims are the entire category’s home turf, and Kong owns the loudest, most recognizable version of that claim by a wide margin. West Paw couldn’t out-shout that with more of the same. On top of that, sustainability messaging in pet products often reads as an add-on rather than a reason to buy, easy for a scrolling audience to skip past. The challenge was making West Paw’s recycling program feel like the headline, not the footnote, without ever asking the audience to care about the planet more than they care about their dog.
The strongest performers didn’t abandon the destruction-test format the category already validated. They extended it. Ads that opened on a genuinely torn-up toy, then revealed it could be mailed back into a new one, consistently beat pure toughness demos on cost efficiency, because the ending gave viewers a reason to keep watching past the part they’d already seen a hundred times from Kong. The “then what?” framing turned a commodity durability claim into a differentiated one without ever discounting the toughness story that got people to stop scrolling in the first place.
