Cats With Thumbs, Orange Men and Meerkats: Why Creative Marketing Needs to Be Different

In the swamp of mediocrity we unfortunately find ourselves in these days, bobbing around amongst AI slop and not-so-well-targeted emails, it can be hard for businesses to stand out. Marketers spend enormous amounts of time thinking about propositions, audiences, product benefits and calls to action, but none of that counts for much if nobody notices their efforts or has completely forgotten about them five minutes later.

It’s something the superb copywriter Dave Harland talked about brilliantly in his talk at The Marketing Meetup’s 2026 conference which he started to deliver under a massive screen with the mantra “In Odd We Trust” above him. Dave’s talk was one of the funniest I had heard in a long while as well as being enlightening. It really resonated with me… whether it was talking about his Dad’s Austin Allegro (my Mum had a similar era Austin 1800), the ‘Don’t Open’ box, or how his work with a Vietnamese laundry moved their messaging away from the traditional tick -box ‘we do x, y and z’ to a solid ‘we’ve been doing x for this long, so we should know how to do it by now’ that is both clear and funny. The overriding message from his talk as well as others on the day was that you don’t necessarily need a massive advertising or marketing budget to stand out – you just need to be creative.

However, in some sectors there is a lot of noise, a lot of attention and a lot of money being thrown around in a scrap to win our attention yet some campaigns use creativity to cut through the dross and etch themselves into our psyche… whether we like it or not. And this is a useful lesson for anyone working in creative, content and social marketing. You don’t necessarily need an enormous advertising budget to be distinctive. Sometimes you simply need to let those ‘different’ ideas thrive and resist the temptation to polish those odd or irregular edges away.

What if cats had thumbs?

Milk isn’t the easiest product to get excited about. There are only so many ways you can talk about freshness, taste, filtration and happy cows before one bottle starts looking rather like another. So Cravendale and Wieden+Kennedy went somewhere completely different and asked what would happen if cats developed opposable thumbs. The resulting “Cats With Thumbs” campaign imagined cats acquiring the one thing preventing them from taking control of world, with their first stop being the milk supply. It was ridiculous, funny and extremely memorable. Wieden+Kennedy reported that the campaign contributed to a 9% year-on-year sales uplift and the advert was voted ITV’s Ad of the Year. Nobody had invented a revolutionary new type of milk. The creative simply gave people a reason to notice an everyday product.

You know when you’ve been Tango’d

Tango did something similarly unconventional with the Orange Man in a campaign that would probably get a thumbs down from the ASA these days. The 1992 advert featured a man painted entirely orange running up to an unsuspecting Tango drinker and slapping him around the face before two commentators analysed what had happened as they would a burst piece of sporting brilliance. “You know when you’ve been Tango’d” became part of popular culture. More than three decades later many people still picture the adverts – which is quite a legacy.

Meerkat Mania

Then there’s Compare the Market. Price comparison websites aren’t an obvious breeding ground for great creative, yet the company created Aleksandr Orlov, a Russian meerkat irritated by people confusing Comparethemarket.com with Comparethemeerkat.com. A silly play on words became an entire fictional universe and “simples” found its way into the vernacular. In some canny brand extension, they pushed the meme from within the advert and started giving away a meerkat toy to everyone who asked for a quote. I think those days are over now, yet they still have a range of meerkat-based incentives and it’s almost 20 years since Aleksandr first graced our screens.

None of these ideas is conventional, but that is precisely the point. The strongest creative doesn’t necessarily come from trying harder to make the same argument as everybody else in a better way than everyone else. AI can now produce an extraordinary amount of competent creative incredibly quickly. Yet competent it is… there is no way – in my mind at least – that we’ll ever see such strokes of marketing genius as mentioned above from a machine. Curiosity, judgement, humour and the confidence to challenge the status quo – decidedly human traits – are even more valuable when businesses are recruiting content, social and creative marketers.