If in doubt put a cat in it...

We all know that cats are a big traffic driver on the web. Lots of people love their feline friends and love to share pictures of them. And have been for a very long time now as this meme / timeline shows ;-)

Cat-lovers were recently in uproar across the web after some poor misguided soul put a cat in a wheelie bin, an act unfortunately caught on a personal cctv webcam, and footage of said act posted on YouTube. Today, a quick search on YouTube rustles up 457 results and the first 5 account for over 500k views. Nuts. In just over a week.  But I am not going to add fuel to the flames by linking or posting it. Instead I am going to link to the spoof Twitter feed some enterprising individual set up, which was wrong so wrong but mildly amusing, and has 29.5k followers as of today.

So, point proven cats drive traffic on the web.

Co-incidental perhaps then that one of my mates just sent me todays Dilbert comic strip:  (Posted as a screengrab as it'll change tomorrow)

(NOTE if you look at the image carefully they encourage you to mash and play!).  Back to the cat theme...

IKEA couldn't have dreamed of the random act by catbinlady occuring & nicely boosting searches for cats for them. Handily just as they were about to let 100 cats loose in one of their UK stores to create footage for a new ad to promote the launch of their new cat-alogue (forgive the pun, but surely someone had to have thought of that one??!).

If you want to watch the making of said cat-ercial click here(be warned it's 4 minutes), or you can just watch the finished result here  (1 minute) as for reasons best know to IKEA they've not made it embeddable, which is pretty poor etiquette these days.

 

Now for a little mashing of my own - take your IKEA UK's cat-ercial and mash it with IKEA Austria's approach to launching the new catalogue...





UPDATE: 27th Sept: Just found the updated cat-section of the Ikea website with some very amusing videos (she says with just a hint of cynicism) under the nav heading "pussy people". Be warned it's got VERY ANNOYING auto on music, so turn that off quick using the mute speaker icon bottom right.  They've also added a competition element whereby you can and match an item of furniture to a specific cat (presumably one that interacted with the item during the ad shoot) to win the item (not the cat), albeit you have to log in via Facebook to complete the competition process.  There's also the new cat-alogue which is indeed a picture of lots of Ikea products with cats sitting on/nearthem!