Are you the creative force behind an ad agency? A company splurging to raise your digital profile? A copywriter crying over your deadline?

Give up — just take a photo of your cat and post it online.

A cat in an ad will get 78 per cent more Facebook users to click through to your company website, according to the findings of Red Square Agency, an ad agency based in Mobile, Ala.

“We wanted to launch an online campaign for the agency and we wanted to test different venues, to find out what kind of advertising works on Facebook instead of Google,” Red Square founder Rich Sullivan told the Toronto Star. “We treated the agency as a guinea pig.”

Looking to expand nationally, the agency, whose clients include the Hard Rock Casino and Cirque du Soleil, ran four ads on Facebook. Constrained by the 135-character limit and single-photo limitations of Facebook advertising, three ads followed a similar space-mocking format: “Red Square is for brevity. Hire us,” one pronounced next to an obscure graphic design.

Then they threw in the cat, Cous Cous, as a laugh. A fourth ad read: “This ad features a cat: It has nothing to do with Red Square Agency but we hope you’ll click on it anyway.” It ran with a photo of an overweight, grey-haired cat with the face of a bulldog staring at an American flag.

More people clicked on the cat. In fact, over the course of 30 days an average of 631 Facebook users clicked on the agency’s real ads, while 1,120 people clicked on Cous Cous.

“The ad absolutely outperformed in every way you can measure,” Sullivan told the Star. And Cous Cous got fan mail sent to their corporate email.

Seems that while Red Square was showing off their webby and W3 awards to attract clients, they should have been cruising the streets to build up a portfolio of cute pets.

Or not.

“The take-away from this isn’t that the crafting or the art of an ad is lost on Facebook, but it exemplifies the idea that people don’t like the idea of adverts on social media, so you have to be even more mindful about how you create them,” Sullivan told the Star. “It almost forces us to be more intelligent because we can’t just do an ad on Facebook.”

Employing the strategy of ads as entertainment, Sullivan and his team created a second series to run on Facebook. Cous Cous, a cat owned by the friend of a designer a Red Square, makes his latest appearance in a new ad, along with a picture of a llama, George, Sullivan’s nephew dressed up as a monkey for Halloween, and the original Cous Cous.

Like the original cat ad, the text has nothing to do with the agency. This time, however, Cous Cous has competition, with George racking up 896 clicks over the last 20 days and the original cat getting 790 clicks.

“People get a kick out of the fact that we aren’t delivering a hard-sell message to people in a social-media environment,” said Sullivan. “We are just trying to entertain or get our personality across.”

The numbers show that the ads are working. The click-through rate is equal to that of the original Cous Cous, and 11 per cent of the people clicking on the ads actually calling the agency.

“What I’ve termed this is the ‘digital mullet strategy.’ Like the mullet haircut, where you have the business in the front and the party in the back, Google and Facebook is our mullet strategy: Google is the business in the front and Facebook is the party in the back,” explains Sullivan.

The ads the company developed for its Google campaign were more standard, directly touting Red Square and its advertising expertise in keywords to attract those actually searching for an advertising agency.

While the Facebook ads took more viewers to the Red Square website, those who clicked through from Google were higher quality users, spending more time looking around the company’s site once they got there.

Previous research by search-engine-marketing expert Jeremy Shoemaker found that ads with cleavage achieved a 61 per cent higher response rate than those that didn’t feature breast.

Cous Cous, get out your bikini.