The Brief

This became Australia’s most successful rehoming campaign to date with 26 million media impressions and over 200,000 bowls of dog food donated via Facebook ‘Likes’. Dog-A-Like became No. 1 App in the Australian iTunes store and we received 5.8 million Facebook users during the campaign. Due to an unprecedented following, the ‘Underdogs’ documentary was also aired on national television. But the best part is, we exceeded our campaign target by achieving a 36% increase in the number of dogs adopted. That's over 2,200 dogs every single month that found a new home and a new start in life.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

To generate as much impact and activation for campaign launch, we knew Bondi was Australia’s most popular beach. So we created Underdog Day and lined the entire 1.5km foreshore with actual shelter dog profiles, encouraging people to adopt. This activation alone gained over 22 million media impressions. The huge audience were then steered online to where the rest of our activity was housed - including Dog-A-Like, a mobile and Facebook app that finds your perfect match and lets you adopt them, a search engine that centralised every shelter dog in the one database, and our online branded documentary called ‘Underdogs’.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

This became Australia’s most successful rehoming campaign to date with 26 million media impressions and over 200,000 bowls of dog food donated via Facebook ‘Likes’. Dog-A-Like became No. 1 App in the Australian iTunes store and we received 5.8 million Facebook users during the campaign. Due to an unprecedented following, the ‘Underdogs’ documentary was also aired on national television. But the best part is, we exceeded our campaign target by achieving a 36% increase in the number of dogs adopted. That's over 2,200 dogs every single month that found a new home and a new start in life.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

Rather than a random shotgun effect of aiming and hoping for the best, our method was to find out exactly where Australians were. Offline and online, we found out exactly where Australians were going to be and what they were doing when they got there. And for our campaign launch, we knew up to 40,000 people and their dogs were going to be at Bondi Beach on any given Saturday. So we created an outdoor activation that engaged and interacted with this audience immediately, setting the fun educational and awareness tone for the rest of the campaign.