In the world of cat-related advertising, the current gold standard is the wildly successful Dear Kitten series of ads, in which a wise cat with a dry approach issues life lessons to a frisky new kitten on his life and surroundings.
A new series of ads from Whiskas hopes to get that same viral appeal by showing kittens in high spirits learning life lessons in Kitten College, an Ivy-covered university that will prepare them for neutering, literature, and knocking down things on desks.
In the first couple of videos, a stern-sounding British professor walks through Kitten Kollege's "diverse student body" of kittens engaging in their various scholarly pursuits, like string theory (yarn); linguistics (learning to meow); and literature (Of Mice and Mice and the works of Franz Katka).
"We have a singular purpose: to develop today's kittens into tomorrow's cats -- cats that the college and society can be proud of," he says in a pitch-perfect spoof of the overblown rhetoric of university promotional material.
What follows is a string of videos of a female professor giving straight-faced lectures on pet maintenance to a mewing gallery of adorably unreceptive feline pupils.
With its dead serious commitment to the bit and the play on the natural absurdity of cats, the series is in the same vein as Friskies' wildly popular "Dear Kitten" Super Bowl ads.
The kittens, however, do what kittens do best: look cute and create chaos. Somehow it doesn't seem to hurt their chances of graduating.
What will determine if these kittens graduate with honors is if they manage to get higher grades than the Dear Kitten series.