The Brief

The target audience was drawn from existing users - our Australian facebook fans that are devout dog lovers. As a specialist pet food brand, Eukanuba has a very limited marketing budget compared to mainstream rivals. However, Eukanuba is involved in consistent CSR initiatives. One such programme was a partnership with Pets Haven Animal Shelter, where Eukanuba had committed to donating a year's supply of food. The marketing objective was to maximize this CSR activity's commercial benefit to Eukanuba with minimum media investment while giving something back to our loyal facebook community.

Creative Execution

Just like its audience who often share news of their pets via social media, Eukanuba is passionate about the health and wellbeing of pets. For this reason, facebook was chosen to communicate directly with our target. We believed people would engage with the brand, share with friends, thus driving awareness of the initiative to wider audiences via the exponential power of social media. While the idea was simple (one click) and emotionally rewarding (playing live with the dogs), it also needed to have purpose: for every game of fetch played, we donated five bowls of Eukanuba to the shelter.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

We created a unique and compelling facebook application that allowed users to literally play fetch with the shelter dogs live and online. Simply by clicking a button, a machine was activated - throwing a ball to a real dog in real time. The shelter dog fetched the ball while users watched live via a video feed. The desired outcome was to increase engagement with our facebook community as well as increase brand affinity through the promotion of Eukanuba's CSR activity to a wider audience.

Results

Users engaged with our facebook page for an average of 10 minutes (5x longer than the facebook norm). The campaign reached 1.2 million facebook users. Free print and TV coverage reached one in five Australians. Eukanuba's facebook page enjoyed 578% growth in weekly new fans. Eukanuba donated 29,000 bowls of dog food - enough to feed the shelter dogs for a whole year. All 66 Play Fetch dogs were adopted after the seven day campaign along with 42 cats. All with a media spend of US$5,500.