The Campaign

If most people prefer white colored dogs? Then we would change all black dogs to white dogs by bleaching their fur! We called it [Black dog whitening project]. We made people get angry about it by using tricky stereotype in a reverse way and make the advertisement controversial. Made people talk about it by visualizing the hidden stereotype in our society that wasn’t easy to be realized by them.

Execution

“Because of Black Dog Syndrome, too many black dogs are left in our shelter. So we decided to bleach all of them but we don’t have enough budget. Please help us now.” We made [a fundraising campaign] as naïve and real as possible to be controversial. After the viral film was released on Youtube and shared on SNS, people started to blame us. People even rallied and protested against the fundraising campaign. After 10 days, we released [another video] that explains the fundraising campaign was fake and resolved a misunderstanding. However, under our intention, black dog syndrome is still a hot topic to discuss. During the campaign, we let people experience the whitening project with [a simulation website] that people could change a black dog’s color to different colors and [a hair spray] to make the black dog white.

Basically, the black dog-related search rate increased by 500%, and the black dog syndrome perception rate increased from 2% to 87%. Not only that, but also social movements appeared. Famous photographers and celebrities voluntarily held photo exhibitions of black dog and it had covered on the major magazines. In addition, a character doll for donation was created and sold. Even a movie director suggested making a short film about black dog and it really happened. The most important thing is that entire the black dog left in the shelter, called Care were adopted. These were not just improvement of black dog’s image, but anti-discrimination campaign against colors.

The Situation

This campaign is using the controversial PR methods that problematize a problem that is not even recognized as problems of society.

The Strategy

We set a goal to target our specific audience between 20s and 40s, which are more familiar with using social media to share and to comments about an issue. In Korea, we have a word ; “a commenting army.” It is very common to see that people are very eager to discuss about an issue in the internet by [a comment], especially when it comes to criticizing it. By using a behavior as a medium, without any media budget, we made people voluntarily share a story about the project and discuss about it at [Comment Below]. As we expected, people were outraged by [Black Dog Whitening Project] and moreover, started to talk about the color stereotype.