MarTech Top Voice Interview Series: Anna Tompkins, Global Head of Marketing – Pet & Group Projects at Rhodes Pet Group.
From building global brand powerhouses to redefining the future of pet care marketing — meet Anna Tompkins, the force behind Rhodes Pet Group’s explosive growth.
With a background in shaping iconic brands like Mars Petcare, Burger King, and Twinings across the UK, Europe, and New Zealand, Anna brings a rare blend of creativity, commercial sharpness, and cultural insight to every launch. Now, as CMO at Rhodes Pet Group, she’s leading a brand revolution — one that blends AI, cultural fluency, and deep emotional intelligence to meet the evolving expectations of Gen Z and Millennial pet parents.
In this exclusive conversation, Anna shares how BONKERS became the most-liked pet treat on TikTok in a single week, why legacy pet brands are missing the mark with modern audiences, and how her team has built five brands across 15 countries in just three years without traditional distribution muscle.
“We don’t chase trends. We identify emotional truths that transcend platforms. And we scale them — with soul.”
From dominating TikTok to reinventing pet care branding, this is what next-gen marketing leadership looks like. Learn from Anna Tompkins, CMO at Rhodes Pet Group, as she reveals how she is using AI, UGC, MarTech insights, and pure creative firepower to scale brands globally.
MarTech Insights (MTI): Hi, Anna. Welcome to the MarTech Top Voice Interview Series. We are inspired by the work you have done in your career. How did your background and experience shape the path that led you to join Rhodes Pet Group?
Anna: I love brands. Always have. I love building them, shaping them, and using creativity and innovation to solve real-world problems. Problems for consumers, for customers, for categories..
I spent much of my career inside some of the world’s great agency networks, working on brands like Mars Petcare, Bodyform, Twinings, Burger King. Brands that are creatively iconic and commercially successful. I led teams across NZ, the UK, Europe, and globally, and was lucky to work with smart people who pushed for work that didn’t just look good but worked hard.
When I returned to New Zealand, I still had a hunger for global work. Work that moved markets. At the time, there weren’t a lot of options. But the ZURU Group kept bubbling up on my radar. I didn’t know much about it before I left NZ, but when I came home, I realised its brands were already so life-surrounding in my life. I was feeding my cat NOOD, using MONDAY Haircare, and putting my baby in Rascals diapers.
What stood out to me was a business that had done its homework. Iit knew the category codes inside out but was intentionally breaking the rules to build something better. Brands that felt fit for now, and for the next generation of consumers. It felt exciting….and a bit wild.
Agency life taught me a lot about scaling ideas and leading brands in complex and diverse markets. But more than anything, it taught me to protect and champion the power of commercial creativity. The kind that grows businesses, not just brand love.
That’s still what drives me. Making it bold. Making it effective.. Making it matter.
MTI: You’ve built five brands across 15 countries in just three years — what core principles guided your global rollout strategy while keeping each brand locally relevant? How much of it is influenced by GenAI and CX trends?
Anna: AI is a massive tool and strategic priority for us right across the ZURU business. By using first principles and embedding AI at every stage, from idea to shelf, we can reinvent how brands are built and products are made. The result: a faster, leaner, and more efficient model that scales with fewer people and almost no waste.
We’re embracing it not only as a shortcut and timeline accelerator, but as a force multiplier. It is helping us move faster, think bigger, and scale smarter across every part of the business. Partnering that with the hundreds of engineers we have across the group dedicated across the group to driving automation into our processes, it is helping turn weeks of product development into hours. Days of design iterations into minutes. Days of content creation into hours. It is helping make our decision making faster and more informed. From CPG to Toys to Housing and Construction. It is embedding into every part of culture.
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MTI: BONKERS became the #1 most-liked pet treat on TikTok in its first week. What does that say about the power of cultural timing and platform-native creativity in pet marketing?
Anna: We built a brand that gets today’s pet parent. That understands that cats and dogs aren’t just pets anymore but that they’re roommates, soulmates, stand-ins for kids, and best friends all rolled into one.
And when you start from that truth, not a brand guideline or a brand onion or a historic tone of voice, you create work that feels real, work that resonates. Work that people don’t scroll past. Because it is grounded in how people actually live.
We haven’t meaningfully seen legacy brands yet move with that shift. There is still tiptoe-ing around the reality of modern pet life. Their houses are too clean, health and nutritional focus too anchoring, their tone too serious, their pets too pristine or well-behaved. Our content pushes away from that. And is resonating.
We also didn’t try to be funny. Which I know sounds a bit silly. But we served up content from culture, or already within culture, that was funny. We didn’t try to tap culture. We made sure to build the brand in a way that would live and breathe INSIDE TikTok culture. We showed the joyful, chaotic, emotional truth of living a real life, with pets. And it is working. I think, because it feels real.
Yes of course cultural timing matters. Platform-native creativity matters. But ultimately, it all comes back to: are you building a brand that’s actually for this generation of pet parents? That represent a new generation of customers? Or one that’s still playing by the old rules?”
MTI: In a crowded market, what’s your approach to staying continuously relevant instead of chasing fleeting virality?
Anna: You can’t manufacture virality. It emerges when your messaging hits a fundamental, big, stretchy, audacious and real insight (or truth) that your audience recognize in their own lives.
Our #betterwhenitsbonkers campaign generated 58 million TikTok views because we captured something universal: pets transform ordinary moments into extraordinary ones. Every pet parent has lived through their cat photobombing a work call or their dog stealing groceries and bolting. These chaotic moments are simultaneously frustrating and funny and joyful.
We don’t chase trends. We identify emotional truths that transcend platforms and product and packaging. Pet parenthood is messy, unpredictable, and deeply rewarding. That insight drives everything from our TikTok content to our product development.
Sustained relevance comes from understanding your customer’s lived experience better than they understand it themselves, then consistently delivering against that truth. Platforms change, algorithms shift, but authentic, big, true, human insights endure.
MTI: You’ve been incredibly successful without relying on traditional distribution clout. How did you convince retailers to bet on your brands early on?
Anna: Great product with real consumer insight and unmissable execution.
Partnered with a mix of determination, persistence, and a slightly unhinged belief that we could pull it off.
We were a TINY and relentless team of Kiwis with big ambition and enormous sample suitcases, pitching to some of the world’s biggest retailers. And it proved to work.. Last year alone, we launched three brands in Walmart and secured a full-bay exclusive launch for NOOD in Target.
But grit is only part of our story.
What supported us in moving the needle was:
- Proof of potential. Or what we talk about a lot, which is ‘proof over promises’. We didn’t show up with just product samples, we showed up with data, momentum, and growth projections that demonstrated real commercial upside. We proved – and we continue to prove – we build brands that connect and convert.
- A new model of marketing. We build marketing into the DNA of our products. Into the naming, the packaging, the brand codes, the TikTok hooks. We show marketing that actually works, with evidence, not marketing for marketing’s sake.
- Real partnership. We don’t treat retailers like gatekeepers. We treat them like collaborators. We show up with ideas, with agility, and with full-funnel marketing plans. We invite feedback, we react to feedback and integrate those learnings into what we build. When Target sees 58 million views on one of our TikTok campaigns, or when Walmart sees us over-delivering on younger pet parents, the question stops being ‘Why stock this?’ and starts being ‘How fast can we scale?’
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MTI: You have championed “mass personalization.” How do you operationalize that at scale without losing authenticity, especially with UGC at the center?
Anna: Mass personalization isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing it smarter.
You can’t fake your way to scale. Not with Gen Z and Millennial audiences who scroll fast, smell inauthenticity instantly, and aren’t tolerating over-engineered brand polish.
So we don’t try to out-polish. We try to out-relate.
We start with human truths, especially around modern pet parenting, and map those to platform specific behaviours. Same insight. Different execution. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat! That’s how we scale without losing authenticity.
Our UGC strategy is built around shared, deeply relatable moments: the chaos of a puppy on Zoom, the cat in your cereal bowl (again), the 4am wake-up call from your ‘fur baby.’ Then we tailor the tone and texture to be bang-on to the creative codes of the specific platform.
Gen Z? Raw, messy, funny, fast. It is a real roll through the vertical-first chaos from their camera roll.
Millennials? Slightly more curated, a little nostalgic, but still grounded in the everyday weirdness of pet ownership.
Authenticity at scale comes from anchoring in a clear emotional truth and then flexing the delivery. It’s not one-size-fits-all. It’s one-core-idea, many many many ways to wear it.
That’s how we stay relevant and real. And it’s why BONKERS became the most-liked pet treat brand on TikTok in its first week.
MTI: What are some overlooked Martech capabilities or integrations that helped you scale Rhodes Pet Science’s marketing engine efficiently?
Anna: We’ve been ruthless about building an engine, not a patchwork. That means prioritising Martech tools that automate the boring, scale the valuable, and integrate across creative, media and retail planning. Not sitting in silos.
One of the most underrated wins for us has definitely been pushing for clean integration between content production and performance data. We’ve set up direct loops between Creator Briefs, UGC testing, TikTok creative results and performance/sales results so what we learn, daily, can shape what we make, fast. It it is not shifting the needle? We change what we are saying.
And we’ve built internal tooling with our Digital and Product Engineering team that automates creative analysis at scale. Think analysing 1M+ TikToks a month for hooks, trends and pacing that can in turn inform and drive our performance.
It’s not about having more Martech. It’s about wiring the system so each input makes the next output smarter. And being relentlessly outcome oriented. Not stacking so hard with data and integrations and capabiblities that it is overload, v useful.
MTI: On popular demand: Legacy brands often struggle with younger audiences. What do you think they misunderstand most about Millennial and Gen Z pet parents?
Anna: The biggest gap, really, is just not recognising how deeply the relationship has shifted.
These aren’t “pet owners” anymore, they’re pet parents, and that’s not just a phrase or a line for a strategy deck but has to be the heart of real true understanding and real true execution.
Most millennials share their beds with their pets. Their pets have birthday parties, Instagram handles, they have daily routines and crazy little foibles. The old rules, where dogs stayed in the yard and slept in a kennel or weren’t allowed on the furniture, they just don’t apply.
The pandemic intensified this shift. Millions brought pets into their homes during lockdown and raised them with 24/7 care. They didn’t leave them and go to work. They were ever-present in their care for them. Just like a baby human. At the same time, many were delaying traditional milestones like homeownership or children, so that energy, that attention, and that affection went straight into their pets.
So, yes, when they say “fur baby,” they mean it.
The legacy brands, to which we have so much respect, do still often speak to a more transactional pet-owner relationship: treats as rewards, clear hierarchy, separation between human and animal. But that’s just not the reality anymore.
This generation’s relationship with pets is emotionally driven, and their expectations, from product quality to brand values, reflect that. Brands that succeed here aren’t just selling to pet people. They’re building with them.
MTI: With pet humanization on the rise, how are evolving consumer-pet relationships challenging traditional brand hierarchies and expectations?
Anna: It’s flipped the hierarchy completely.
Legacy cues like scale or age in market don’t matter when you’re talking to people who treat their pets like their children. They’re not shopping based on corporate reputation. They’re choosing what feels emotionally aligned to them and what has been OBSESSIVELY considered.
The parallels to baby care (and helpfully we have a baby care business!) are strong. Parents don’t lead with features, they lead with trust. It’s exactly the same here. At Rhodes, when we talk about things like ingredient traceability in NOOD or protein quality in BONKERS, we don’t start with technical specs. We start with why it matters to someone who sees their cat or dog as family. Pet parents scrutinize labels the same way they would for their human children.
This blows up the rules on legacy advantage. Brand heritage means nothing if you can’t demonstrate genuine understanding of the parent-child dynamic. Smaller brands that authentically connect with pet parents can disrupt decades-old market leaders overnight.
Today it goes: emotional connection first, product proof second, brand legacy last. That’s what we’re building against.
MTI: How do you balance performance marketing metrics with brand-building efforts in categories where emotional connection drives loyalty?
Anna: You don’t balance them. You build ruthlessly strong brand(s) to make performance work harder.
In emotionally charged categories loyalty is earned through connection, not just conversion. BONKERS for example wasn’t built to optimise for click-through. It was built to mean something to a generation who didn’t think the current assortment meant anything for them or their pet.. And when your brand and your brand platform carries that emotional weight, your performance marketing doesn’t have to work alone. It is amplified by brand. Brand distinctiveness, cultural resonance, and – super importantly for us – shareability.
That’s the Rhodes approach: we invest in brand comms, distinctive assets, and hero creative because we know it unlocks long-term ROI. It drives stronger performance metrics and behaviour that’s emotional, not transactional.
In short. We build the brand right. It is my number one priority. And the numbers follow. Not the other way around.
MTI: Looking ahead, what’s one big shift in pet consumer behavior that marketers aren’t ready for — but should be?
Anna: The pandemic pet boom is hitting middle age. Those lockdown puppies are now adults, heading toward senior status in just a few years.
This creates a massive, underserved market: pet parents who’ve never navigated aging with their fur babies. These aren’t traditional pet owners managing natural life cycles. These are emotional parents facing their child’s mortality for the first time.
The spending implications are enormous. We’ll see explosive growth in senior pet care: specialized nutrition, supplements, mobility aids, and medical interventions. But the messaging opportunity is even bigger.
Most brands will approach this clinically, focusing on joint health and cognitive support. The smart play is emotional: helping pet parents extend quality time with their children or ‘defend’ the longevity of their pet. . That’s a fundamentally different value proposition than “senior dog food.”
MTI: Tag a marketing leader from the industry whose response you would like to see at the MarTech Insights Top Voice program:
Anna: @CraigandBridget from craigandbridget.co.uk
The best and most brilliant brand thinkers I know. They cut through noise, solve the real problem, and build brands that commercially move. Would love to hear their take.
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About Anna Tompkins
A multi-award-nominated marketing leader, she was a 2024 finalist for both Digiday Marketing Executive of the Year and NZMA Marketer of the Year, and part of teams recognized by TIME and Fast Company for innovation and brand excellence. As head of media investment strategy at ZURU Group, she brings deep global experience across iconic brands like Mars, Twinings, Burger King, and Rhodes Pet Science. Her leadership has shaped Cannes Lions and D&AD Pencil-winning campaigns and powered next-gen pet brands like NOOD, BONKERS, GOODLANDS, and Smartbox to global success—earning millions of loyal customers and redefining pet wellness across major markets.
About Rhodes Pet Group
Rhodes Pet Science, a proud member of the ZURU Group, is a next-generation pet care company dedicated to creating innovative, science-backed brands that meet the evolving needs of modern pet owners. With a mission to deliver products loved by both pets and their people, Rhodes Pet Science blends deep consumer insight with advanced formulation and design. Backed by ZURU’s global scale—5000+ employees across 26 offices and presence in 120+ markets—the company is redefining pet wellness through award-winning brands like NOOD, BONKERS, GOODLANDS, and Smartbox, driving rapid growth and earning global consumer trust.
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