Results and Effectiveness

Successfully, over 60% of the dogs on the day were adopted and this four-hour event reached over 22 million people via earned national media. Considering that Australia has a population of only a little over 22 million people, that’s quite significant. Better still, the education and PR gained from this event helped to rehome thousands of more dogs throughout the campaign.

Creative Execution

Every media channel was selected for a specific reason and targeted a specific audience. For example, we knew Australia’s most popular beach was Bondi, attracting up to 40,000 people on any given Saturday. So to give these dogs a better chance of adoption, in one day we transformed Bondi Beach into Underdog Day. 1.5km of yellow branded dog leads were tied along Bondi’s entire foreshore (also one of Australia’s most popular dog walking tracks). At the end of each lead was the image and profile of an actual shelter dog waiting to be adopted. And with a unique code attached to each profile, people were encouraged to enter the code online to find out more about each dog and adopt them.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Sadly, over 100,000 shelter dogs are needlessly euthanised every year in Australia because most people think they are damaged and find it difficult visiting shelter homes to adopt. So, we knew where Australians weren’t going. Yet, based on extensive media findings, we also knew where Australians were going. And if we couldn’t bring Australians to the shelter dogs, we’d use targeted media to bring every shelter dog directly to them. In the end, media wasn’t just the vehicle to create awareness or enable adoption. Media became the idea.