Friskies will announce this morning that it is no longer just a cat food brand. It has larger catspirations, and is catapulting itself into a new category. It is to be the namesake of The Friskies, the first (and possibly annual) large-scale competition to name the Internet cat video of the year–including a $15,000 grand prize, and truckloads of cat food. The Nestlé Purina brand is speaking loudly, putting its money where its needle teeth and spiny tongues are and saying: I can has branding opportunity?

You can, Friskies. Though it’s amazing it took this long.

If a brand is a cat, the Internet is a small box to be squeezed into. It is dubstep to be danced to. A lime to be worn as a hat. And yet, while brands of all types have hijacked various Internet flotsam, established cat brands have been comparatively slow to try riding the Internet cat meme. Some don’t paw it at all; others do it clumsily. But many brands are at least now trying. The Internet cat is about to be colonized, and Friskies is carrying the catnip.

How new is this? Friskies only launched a Facebook page last spring. It followed that up with iPad games for cats (most involve a cat tapping at the screen); training a cat named Buddy to play the games and then pitting it against random college mascots; and a party at Austin’s SXSW Interactive, where it partnered with Cheezburger Network to unveil four sculptures of famous Internet cats–all made of cheese. But The Friskies contest is arguably the most ambitious: It’s overseen by a panel of celebrity judges (including Wayne White, original set designer for Pee Wee’s Playhouse), and come November 5, Friskies will have a cat-humor artillery of finalists to unload online.

Importantly, The Friskies will consider any cat video created in 2012 that its original creator submits. That is to say, cat owners don’t have to make content for Friskies; they just have to send in stuff they already made. Stuff that may have even already gone viral. It’s tough for a brand to invest in silly cat videos that may go nowhere, so this is a clever solution–a way to comfortably attach the Friskies name to Internet-tested material. So, I ask communications brand manager Shaun Belongie: That’s the point, right?

“One of the things we celebrate is that cats have this really vivid imagination,” says Belongie (a claim substantiated by the brand’s jaw-droppingly trippy “Feed the Senses” ads). “They experience the world differently. Cat videos, in a lot of ways, really do celebrate the imagination of cat owners and cats.”

Yes, yes. But you’re trying to boost the brand on the back of an Internet meme, right?