culture “Catvertising” Swipes at the Internet

How Toronto ad agency John St. attracted international attention with a YouTube advertising spoof.

The savviest theorists of our modern media age have suggested that the internet is, in fact, made of cats. Toronto-based advertising agency John St. has taken this idea one step further: “Catvertising,” the firm’s YouTube parody of overeager marketing strategists, hit the tubes on November 10 and has already received attention from international media outlets, including Time and New York Magazine, for its comically spot-on assessment of digital-age attention seeking.

The video itself, with its glossy production and heavy industry-speak, is convincingly deadpan. “In 2012, John St. will lead the industry into a brand-new communications era with the launch of the world’s first, and only, catvertising agency,” a cool female voice-over narrates as cats tumble over paperwork piles, supervised by a legion of agency keeners.

“Cat videos provide an excellent return on investment,” says a poker-faced Angus Tucker, one of John St.’s real-life partners and creative directors. “The costs are minimal. It’s win-win.”

Stephen Jurisic, a partner and creative director of John St., says that the idea for the “Catvertising” video developed organically. “In our industry, everyone’s saying ‘Do something with Facebook! Do something social! Find a new way to get people’s attention!’ It’s an overall issue with advertising, that everyone’s always finding a way to communicate better. And look at cat videos—they’re 27 million views, 30 million views. ‘Let’s just use cats!’ We had fun with it. We’re not taking ourselves too seriously.”

Sure, it’s not the world’s most original concept: YouTube commenters have already pounced on John St. with accusations that “Catvertising” borrowed from another YouTube offering about a cat-centric production company, “Kittywood Studios,” posted three months earlier on YouTube channel Pixelspersecond. A representative from John St. replied on the site that the similarities, while striking, are an “honest coincidence.”

“Catvertising” gave the agency a chance to poke fun at itself and the industry it represents, but it was also John St.’s way of showcasing its creative pulse to a broad and sympathetic audience—an advertising spoof that was also, by default, an ad for a company that makes ads. Circular thinking? Maybe, but for a firm whose mandate is to “make our clients’ brands unignorable,” attention is the nature of the beast. And if the Internet has taught us anything it’s that, where cats are involved, we have a hard time looking away.

“We do these things a lot of times to attract talent,” admits Jurisic, who, along with his colleagues—and nine of their cats—is also featured in the video. “It’s a way to kind of show the world what we’re made up of and who we are.”

Jurisic notes that another spoof video the company made last year, about a girl’s birthday party, also received a fair amount of notice. Yet, nothing compares to the response that has poured in from their latest effort. There’s something about those cats.

Says Jurisic: “It’s kind of crazy how it’s spreading. It is a big surprise for us. We really loved making it.”