The internet hardly needs yet another cute cat, but Mittens the kitten is a radical departure from those piano-playing, skateboard-riding felines so prevalent on YouTube. The host of CancerKitty.com, a new website developed by Toronto digital agency Kolody, is pushy and even a little profane.
Mittens belongs to a woman named Sandy Kybartas, a TV and film production designer whose credits include The Listener and Murdoch Mysteries. Last year, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer that often proves fatal within 4-7 years.
The site is working to raise $125,000 for Kybartas and three other people to participate in a clinical trial being conducted by Toronto’s Dr. Armand Keating. The trial uses so-called “Natural Killer” cells, which attack cancer cells.
Visitors to the site can watch video messages from Kybartas and Mittens, or donate to the cause.
While navigating the site, Mittens occasionally pops up to deliver off-kilter messages like “If I live long enough to have babies, I’ll name one after you. Seriously, I’ll let them suck at each of my eight nipples”; “I don’t want to be found when the neighbours call in the smell. Hit the donate button”; and “How about a little less heartstrings and a little more purse strings.”
“Creating another ‘help cancer victims’ site is probably not the easiest task because, unfortunately, the market is inundated with them,” said Chad Borlase, the former co-creative director at Bos Advertising who joined Kolody as CD in April. “We wanted to do something different so that we could stand out, get noticed.
Borlase said Kybartas and Dr. Keating are “not in the field of understanding what’s happening in the digital space, but when we showed them how many people with very similar problems were actually asking for money online in very boring ways, and how they were going to get lost in the mix, they saw that it made sense.”
