We spent three days at Booth #7764 at SUPERZOO in Las Vegas this month running the show’s official headshot studio, handing out an unreasonable number of branded tennis balls, and raffling off a fully produced video. In between all of it, we talked shop with something like 200 pet brands: food and treat companies, the ingredient and packaging manufacturers behind them, retailers, and a handful of reptile-focused brands who reminded us all that man’s best friend isn’t always the furriest.
We walked in with the intent to listen and learn. Here’s what came up again and again, and what we think it tells us about where pet brand video marketing is headed next.
What We Heard
Everyone knows they need video. Not everyone believes they can afford to do it well.
“We know video works, we just haven’t found anyone who can make it look like us and not a template,” a brand manager at a mid-size treat company told us on our first morning. That sentence, in one form or another, came up many times over three days.
The hesitation was rarely about whether video matters. Almost every brand we talked to already believes it does. The hesitation is about cost and complexity, the fear of a clunky one-off shoot that doesn’t look, sound, or feel like the brand, followed by radio silence until the next budget cycle. What actually lit people up was the idea of a partner who sticks around long enough to learn a brand’s voice, its product cadence, and its audience, and who gets faster and cheaper to work with over time instead of starting from zero on every project.
Manufacturers don’t think video is “for them” until they hear the case for it.
Our booth saw a steady stream of ingredient suppliers, co-packers, and packaging manufacturers who quietly assumed video wasn’t part of their world. “We’re B2B — the brands buying from us already know who we are,” a representative from a pet food ingredient supplier said when we asked about their content plans. It’s a fair assumption on its face. These companies aren’t chasing consumer attention on Instagram.
But that logic misses where the real leverage is: a short testimonial video from a brand partner, walking through why they chose that ingredient supplier and what changed after they did, is one of the most persuasive assets a B2B pet company can put in front of its next prospect. We spent a lot of time at the booth making that case, and by Day Three it was clearly starting to land.
“How am I supposed to keep up when there are this many platforms?”
That question, nearly verbatim, came from a marketer running content for her own pet products company. She’s not alone. Nearly every brand of her size told some version of the same story: a small team trying to feed a content calendar across four or five platforms that all behave differently and reward different formats.
That’s a real production problem, not just a bandwidth problem, and it matters more in pet than in most categories. Pet food and pet product brands lean hard on paid social to hit new households, which means their ads are competing in one of the most saturated feeds on the internet, and ad blindness sets in fast when the same three video assets run for months. The brands pulling ahead are the ones treating content as an always-on system: a steady supply of fresh, on-brand footage that can be cut a dozen different ways, so the algorithm and the audience never get bored of the same fifteen seconds.
Nobody outside the industry understands what it takes to put an animal on set.
“Is it even realistic to get a camera-ready dog on short notice?” It’s a question we get constantly, and it points to a real knowledge gap: most brands have never worked with a production team that handles animal talent regularly, so they assume it’s either impossibly expensive or impossibly risky.
It’s neither, with the right setup. We talked through our pet roster with dozens of brands on the floor — dogs, cats, and yes, reptiles, all pre-vetted for temperament and camera comfort — and our directors, who are trained specifically to work animals into a shoot without turning the day into chaos or the budget into a mess. For a lot of brands, that conversation was the first time “having animals in our video” moved from a someday idea to something they could actually plan around.
Where this is heading
Pet wellness isn’t a trend anymore, it’s table stakes. The conversations on the floor mirrored what we’re seeing across the category: functional ingredients (gut health, joint support, novel and alternative proteins), clean labels, and personalized nutrition are no longer premium add-ons, they’re baseline expectations at every price point, from grocery-aisle brands to specialty. Even treats and snacks, historically the impulse-buy corner of the category, are getting the same functional treatment as food. Think dental health, calming, and mobility support built into something that still reads as a reward. That shift matters for video because “wellness” is a hard claim to make convincingly in a static image or an ingredient list. It’s much easier to earn trust in a claim like “supports digestion” or “clinically formulated” when a brand can actually show the sourcing, the process, or a real customer’s results on camera instead of asking people to take a label’s word for it.
The floor also confirmed something the show’s own education programming leaned into this year: the pet category is more crowded than it’s ever been, and differentiation on product alone is getting harder. Analysts covering the space have started describing the market as barbelling, shoppers picking either a premium, science-backed option or an affordable private-label alternative, with a shrinking middle for anyone without a clear point of view. When shelves and feeds are full of brands making similar wellness claims at similar price points, the tiebreaker increasingly comes down to trust and story: who a brand is, who’s behind it, and whether buyers believe the claims enough to switch.
What it means for pet brands
A few practical takeaways, if you’re mapping this back to your own content plan:
- Treat video as infrastructure, not a project. A single hero video ages out fast, especially at the pace pet brands are burning through paid social impressions. A system that produces usable footage on a regular cadence outlasts any one campaign, keeps ad fatigue at bay, and gets cheaper per asset over time as your production partner learns your brand.
- If you’re a manufacturer or supplier, testimonial video from your brand partners is probably your highest-leverage asset and one of the most underused in the category. It does the trust-building work a spec sheet can’t.
- Wellness and functional claims land harder on camera than in copy. If it’s a claim you’re proud of, show the sourcing, the process, or a real customer’s results instead of just printing it on the label.
- In a crowded, barbelling market, story and authenticity are becoming real differentiators, not soft ones. Behind-the-scenes content builds the trust that gets someone to pick your brand over a nearly identical one next to it.
- Don’t let “we don’t know how to shoot with animals” be the reason a concept dies. With the right production partner, it’s a solvable logistics problem, not a strategic one.
What we’re doing about it
Everything we heard on the floor is already shaping how we work with pet brands. We’re leaning further into long-term production partnerships instead of one-off shoots, so brands get a team that actually knows their product line, their audience, and their voice by the third project, not the first. We’re expanding our pet roster and the number of directors trained specifically for animal-inclusive shoots, so “we have a dog in the video” stops being a scheduling headache. And we’re building content systems designed for volume: enough footage, planned and produced efficiently, to keep an always-on calendar fed without one overstretched marketer trying to do it all alone.
And if any of this (the platform juggling, the animal-on-set questions, the “we know we need video” feeling) sounds like your brand’s exact problem, we’d genuinely just like to talk it through.
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