The Bigger Picture
Year: 2026Client: WhiskasPartners: Nine Lives Greece + public bodies/municipalities (proposed)Industry: Animal Welfare / TourismProactive/speculative project. Not commissioned by or affiliated with WHISKAS, Mars Petcare or Nine Lives Greece.Greece’s street cats appear in countless holiday pictures every year. Somewhere along the way, they became part of the picture of Greece itself.
THE ASK
Greece’s street cats have become part of the scenery. They appear on whitewashed walls, under taverna tables and across countless holiday photos, so familiar that we can recognise the “Greek street cat” without necessarily questioning what made it a street cat.
How can we make people see Greece’s street cats differently, without turning them into another sad story?
~2M estimated unowned cats {source}
158K officially registered strays {source}
1 in 4 municipalities recorded <20 cats {source}
THE TURN
Greece’s street cats have become so much a part of the place that being stray can start to look like simply being Greek.
THE ANSWER
The attention is already there. Make it useful.
Instead of asking people to change their behaviour, turn something they already do, photographing Greece’s street cats — into a simple way to contribute to a clearer picture of them.
THE APPROACH
Instead of asking people to pay more attention to Greece’s street cats, I looked at the attention they already give them.
Visitors photograph them constantly, on walls, under taverna tables, in village streets, taking those encounters home as part of their memories of Greece. So rather than creating a new behaviour, the campaign gives an existing one a second purpose.
The idea: THE BIGGER PICTURE.
One capture. Two lives.
A picture for you. A contribution to the bigger one.
CATS ARE NOT MONUMENTS
Make the familiar strange again.
Greece’s street cats have become such a familiar part of the landscape that we photograph them almost like we photograph Greece itself.
So we treated completely ordinary street cats with the visual conventions normally reserved for protected monuments.
Nothing about the cat changes. Only the way we look at it does.
MEET THE LOCALS
Enter a behaviour already happening.
Greek street cats already appear across holiday photos and social content as part of the experience of Greece, often affectionately treated as “the locals.”
Rather than correcting that behaviour, The Bigger Picture uses it as the invitation.
MET A LOCAL?
Add them to The Bigger Picture.
One simple invitation, placed where encounters already happen, and where visitors may already have the picture in their camera roll.
THE DEPARTURE MOMENT
Don’t ask people to find a cat. Ask them to look at what they’ve already found.
By the time the journey ends, the behaviour may have already happened. Their camera roll may already contain exactly what The Bigger Picture needs.
So the campaign turns waiting and travelling time into a moment to look back, and gives an existing memory a second purpose.
THE PLATFORM
Make contributing almost as easy as taking the picture.
The platform is deliberately lightweight. No searching for cats. No new content to create. No lengthy reporting.
Choose a photo or video you’ve already taken, confirm the location, add optional context and contribute it to The Bigger Picture.
Maximum intelligence behind the scenes. Minimum effort in front of people.
Technology can help organise and compare contributions so they complement existing records and local welfare knowledge, without publicly exposing precise cat locations.
THE LIVING BIGGER PICTURE
THOUSANDS OF PICTURES. ONE BIGGER PICTURE.
Every contribution becomes part of a growing digital installation, where thousands of individual cat photos come together to form The Bigger Picture.
From a distance, one collective image. Up close, the individual encounters that created it.
Every new contribution makes the picture a little clearer.
Proactive/speculative project. Not commissioned by or affiliated with WHISKAS, Mars Petcare or Nine Lives Greece.