What an AI pet psychic reveals about full-funnel retail media

In a fragmented attention economy, retail media is increasingly being asked to do it all: build brands, drive clicks and close the sale in the same breath. The collaboration between Mars Australia and Amazon Ads shows how entertainment and engagement are becoming the connective tissue of a genuinely full-funnel strategy, rather than just a creative flourish tacked onto performance media.

Working with Amazon Ads’ Brand Innovation Lab, Mars built the Dine Cat Decoder: an AI-powered tool hosted on Amazon that translated cats’ behaviour into personalised “thoughts” in playful, animated videos. Pet owners uploaded photos of their cats, answered a few questions about how they interact with them, and received customised video translations that were shareable and, crucially, shoppable.

From “always on” to “always shopping”

For Kasey Jamison, director of retail media sales at Amazon Ads, the biggest shift is not in the media itself, but in how people move through it. “Shoppers aren’t just browsing and buying; they’re streaming entertainment, researching products, making purchases, and they’re doing it simultaneously across multiple screens,” she told Inside Retail. “I like to say customers aren’t going shopping. They’re always shopping.”

That behaviour blurs traditional distinctions between brand and performance marketing. Jamison argues that the old binary simply “doesn’t apply anymore, because retail media… can connect both.” The strategic question becomes less about whether a placement is upper or lower funnel, and more about whether it feels relevant and compelling at the exact moment a customer is flicking between couch, content and cart.

Dine Cat Decoder as entertainment-forward funnel

Mars’ premium cat food brand Dine set out to reach younger adult cat owners and reinforce its luxury positioning, but also to drive measurable sales both on and off Amazon. Research showed that while most cat owners enjoyed spoiling their pets, they were often unsure what their cat actually wanted, leaving an insight gap retail media was well placed to fill.

“The brands that are really breaking through… they’re not just running ads, they’re creating experiences that delight and add value to customers,” Jamison said. “In Dine’s example, they came to us with this insight: cat owners want to know what their cats are thinking… So from a creative perspective, we created something that cat owners genuinely wanted to engage with.” More than 9,500 personalised videos were generated, with a 99 per cent completion rate and a click-through rate five times higher than Amazon’s benchmark.

The campaign was orchestrated deliberately as a full-funnel flywheel. Premium video ads on Prime Video first introduced the Cat Decoder concept in a lean-back environment, optimised for attention rather than immediate conversion. The interactive Cat Decoder experience on Amazon’s store then turned passive viewers into active participants, shifting them from awareness to consideration. Finally, sponsored products and other lower-funnel placements captured in-aisle demand once shoppers had already built an emotional connection with the brand.

Scale with precision, not ubiquity

Jamison was quick to stress that showing up “everywhere” is not the point. “Brands should show up across every touchpoint,” she said. “But I think being everywhere doesn’t mean being effective everywhere.” Her mantra is “scale, but precision”: reach matters, but not at the expense of relevance.

For Dine, that meant using Amazon’s first-party browsing, streaming and shopping signals to find cat lovers at the awareness stage, then tightening the focus to confirmed cat owners for the personalised Cat Decoder experience and purchase prompts. “That’s the beautiful thing about signals,” Jamison said. “You can have confidence that you’re speaking to that right customer at the right time and eliminating that waste, and you can do it again at scale across the funnel.”

The pay-off was not just engagement, but business results. Over a six-week campaign, units sold on Amazon increased by 73 per cent year on year, with 36 per cent of sales coming from new-to-brand shoppers. A Circana offline study found a 2.2 per cent uplift in Dine’s total offline sales and a 2.9 per cent uplift across featured Dine products, demonstrating that an entertainment-led activation could drive in-store buying as well.

Entertainment as a strategic lever

If entertainment once sat firmly in the “nice-to-have” bucket, Jamison sees it now as a core business lever. “Finding the creative innovation that delights customers and can create that emotional connection is truly the biggest opportunity,” she said. The role of Amazon’s Brand Innovation Lab is to “transform a brand’s most ambitious ideas and turn it into custom experiences across the entire Amazon canvas,” but those ideas increasingly need to justify their existence through hard metrics.

Sophisticated marketers, she noted, are no longer asking only about return on ad spend. Instead, they are looking at new-to-brand conversion, shifts in brand perception, category penetration and how advertising insights inform decisions about product development and inventory planning. In the case of Dine, the campaign’s ability to drive both online and offline sales, while acquiring new shoppers and deepening loyalty, positioned entertainment not as a gamble but as a disciplined growth strategy.

For fashion and beauty brands watching retail media’s evolution, the lesson from Dine is less about pet food and more about posture. Treat streaming, interactive tools and retail media not as separate lines on a plan, but as a single entertainment-to-engagement pipeline, underpinned by signals and closed-loop measurement. Or, as Jamison put it, think “from couch to cart” and design for a shopper who is always shopping—even when they think they’re just watching TV.

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