Natalia Ball, global chief growth officer at Mars Pet Nutrition joins The Big Impression podcast to talk about how Pedigree transformed a local Brazilian insight into a global business story. She also shares why she is now focused on the next frontier of growth: Connected commerce and making sure brands show up when AI agents, not just people, are making purchasing decisions. Episode Transcript Please note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio. Damian Fowler (00:00): I'm Damian Fowler. Ilyse Liffreing (00:01): And I'm Ilyse Liffreing. Damian Fowler (00:02): And welcome to The Big Impression. Ilyse Liffreing (00:09): This week we're joined by Natalia Ball Global Chief Growth Officer at Mars Pet Nutrition home to brands like Pedigree and Sheba. Damian Fowler (00:18): Last March, pedigree launched a bold, purpose-driven campaign in Brazil celebrating mixed breed dogs, especially the iconic Vela Caramelo. Ilyse Liffreing (00:27): It wasn't just a campaign, it became a movement boosting adoption and challenging long held bias. Damian Fowler (00:35): The work went on to win top honors at the 2025 cans. Lions including the titanium lion Ilyse Liffreing (00:41): And its impact is still rippling across markets and media channels worldwide. Damian Fowler (00:45): So today we're unpacking what made it work with the person who helped drive it. Natalia, tell us about the Carello campaign and how you landed on the idea. Natalia Ball (00:57): Carmelos are mixed dogs that are beloved in Brazil. They are found on the streets everywhere. They are the subject of meme, street culture, and people just identify Carmelo as the Brazilian dog. However, the inside that we discover was that this dog is 90% less likely to get adopted than breed dogs. So it is the most popular dog in Brazil, but the most overlooked. And when we learned about that, we decided that we wanted to make a difference and that we wanted this dog to get the position it deserve and pedigree decided to champion the underdog and become the official brand of caramel's in Brazil. Damian Fowler (01:41): You talked about the caramel. Could you just describe a little bit more for people who don't really know the caramelo and that term Vita, where does that come from? Natalia Ball (01:52): Yes, so caramels are basically mixed breed dogs that you can find on the streets of Brazil everywhere they are called caramel because they are caramel color and that's what it is in Spanish and they tend to be that caramel color, short hair. But there are different ways that these dogs look and feel because they are mixed breeds. But like I said, they are beloved dogs in Brazil, but when it comes to getting a pet, getting a dog, they are not the ones that people are going for. They see them as street dogs, not a dog that you have in your house. And the whole campaign was about, like I said, championing these caramels, driving adoption of mixed breed dogs, not only breed dogs. And we did that by saying that if caramels were considered non breeded, pedigree was going to give them a breed and who better to give them a breath than pedigree. Ilyse Liffreing (02:48): Great. And then at what point did you connect that insight to the campaign itself? Natalia Ball (02:54): What you need to know about pedigree? Pedigree is one of the largest dog brands in the world. Pedigree feeds more dogs than any other brand, and it has been there for many years and for the past 20 years or more, pedigree has been driving adoption, encouraging people to adopt pets everywhere. We have had a lot of iconic campaigns so much which maybe you would've heard, like for example, docs on Zoom during COVID or the child replacement program, which was a very interesting one. And we were talking about adoption in Brazil, but other local brands were talking about adoption too. So we were not cutting through and it was only when this insight came to us, which was a very deeply local insight that we made the connection, if we want to drive adoption in Brazil, this is going to be the way in and we're going to make this as big as it can possibly be. (03:51): Because we, from the very beginning saw we understood this idea of the vi Lata. You mentioned it before by the way, the vi lata is how you call mixed breed dogs in Brazil. And so when we had these conversations about this insight, the injustice of this beautiful dog not getting adopted, but also the cultural impact that it would have on resilience themselves, who could see themselves related in the fact that they were being championed, we decided to go really big on this campaign and not only do just an activation, but actually we are doing this campaign. We did it all of last year and we continue activating through this year. And some of the ways in which we championed this was actually by creating a caramel kennel club by creating the first ever caramel DNA testing. And it's the largest ever DNA test done in mos in all of history, kept creating a Carmelo dog show and not only that, putting caramels for the very first time ever on our packs. So it was really a way to give them the rightful place. Ilyse Liffreing (05:01): I love how you guys just took it a step further than even just it being a campaign and you actually adopted it into your packaging and the whole bit. At what point did you realize that the campaign wasn't only just a marketing ploy and it began actually affecting culture? Natalia Ball (05:23): Yeah, I mean this campaign has really changed culture in Brazil, but it was a campaign that was deeply rooted in culture itself because Carmelos were part of Brazilian culture. But when we realized the campaign became bigger than ourselves, absolutely. When it started driving difference in adoption of Carmelos, we saw more than 200% lift of caramelo adoption just in the first month. And we saw a 65% increase in likelihood to adopt a Carmelo in the future with this campaign. And then when we started seeing other brands and other businesses even outside of the pet care category start using the Carmelo in their campaigns in their advertising, that's when we knew this had really hit culture big. An example of that was Chevrolet that actually launched a partnership with Netflix that launched a documentary about caramel, and several launched a caramel or a caramel colored car in a promotion. (06:29): Other brands like Honda or Whirlpool also feature caramels in their advertising. So we started seeing that this became much bigger than ourselves, but maybe the biggest achievement that we had with this campaign other than driving adoption itself, which was the cost at the end of the day, was the fact that we were betting on the mixed pre-doc actually not being accepted in dog shows because only breed dogs are accepted usually in dog shows. But at the end of the day, the movement became so big that after only two weeks of this campaign, the federation that actually controls the dog shows called us and said, we now want to move to accept mixed breed dogs in all of our shows. So that was a huge achievement that we never knew it would be possible. Damian Fowler (07:18): What's really interesting to me about this campaign is the way you focused on one region, one country, one market, but obviously you're a global brand. So how does that connection to the local end up escalating? So it became this global campaign. Natalia Ball (07:35): Like I said, adoption is a huge cost for us, and we have been very consistently on pedigree, driving adoption for a long time. So we have an evergreen brief that goes out to all of our agencies on adoption, and in my case in particular, I am a strong believer in creative excellence as a driver for growth. And so I put a creative excellence program in place that included building capabilities on creative excellence, but also creating a creative council where the best ideas could come faster to the marketing leadership of Mars Pet Nutrition so that we could move at speed, but also we could fund the better ideas. And in this creative council DL map team, Al Map VO, who are the agency that came up with this idea presented Carmelo. And from the very beginning, me and the whole leadership team fell in love with it, and so we decided to fund it. (08:31): We decided to go big and to give it our full support. We knew it had the potential to drive the business and change culture, and I think in this case, the important thing about the campaign, obviously it did a lot of good. So it's a purposeful campaign and pedigree is a purposeful brand, but it was not only about the purpose, it was also about driving business results. Through the campaign in the first couple of months, we were able to grow 15% and through all of last year, we moved to grow volume and value by double digits. So the campaign really did the job about turning around the pedigree brand and delivering results not only on the cost but also on the business. Ilyse Liffreing (09:11): That's great. And you're doing something right when all the other brands out there are copying you guys suddenly in pop culture and everything like that. I'm very curious about as the campaign evolved, obviously it started out from a social aspect, but as it evolved, how did you decide what other channels to bring it into? What other channels did you try out in this process? Natalia Ball (09:42): Yes. Actually this campaign started as social first and we then boosted with media. The way it started is we partner with local influencer called Tata Vernick. She loves caramels and she herself has adopted caramels. And we asked her to register her caramel in a dog show because we knew that her caramel was going to get rejected, which it did. And so she posted on her Instagram that had 60 million followers that she was outraged that her beautiful and smart caramelo could not be accepted in a dog show. This went viral immediately in Brazil and everybody was outraged. Thi
