The Campaign

The key insight was discovered in an observation of a common popular habit that owners repeatedly do and share - photographing the joyful moments of their dogs. While we often see owners take lovely pictures of their dogs, none has ever paid attention to the owners’ faces in such moments – expressing special feelings from the bottom of the heart, with truly genuine smiles which they would rarely show in front of the others. It led us to the insight around “the smiles that dogs can only witness”.

Execution

With this idea of “phoDOGrapher”, we created a short movie content featuring three actual families with their dogs, and released it on the day that people become most conscious about smile - the National Smile Day.

The video was appeared 120 times on web magazines, digital news sites. Considering the amount of investment, 32.3 mil-worth media coverage generated with this campaign. The viewership of youtube has reached to 236,000 views. In terms of brand engagement, social listening showed that people express extremely positive reaction to the campaign. Overall intention of dog ownerships increased by 7% after watching the movie, and their potential usage intention of MARS brands increased by 5%.

The Situation

This was the very first attempt for Mars Japan to invest only on non-TV communication. While we understand its increasing impact, we have long been unable to find the way to utilize digital communication, as TV is still being the most effective and proven media in pet care category, where the main target is much skewed to elder generations. Although it is done in an experimental way with minimum scale, the campaign gave us clear inspiration that, if you successfully identify strong consumer insights, you don’t have to be afraid of going beyond TVC to create an successful campaign.

The Strategy

Based on the insight around “the smile only dogs can witness”, we put dogs - that have always been considered as photographic subject - on the other side of the lens.