Our mission was clear: Encourage dog adoption. But in order to do so, we needed to address one of the main reasons people don’t adopt dogs from a shelter: they aren’t purebred dogs. Lots of people discriminate mongrel dogs although they can be as good pets as dogs with pedigree. So, we decided to make a comparison between them to generate awareness about the importance of adopting dogs that are looking for a home.

We saw an opportunity: In Halloween month (October), people love to dress up their pets. So, we created purebred dog costumes to dress up the pets of the shelters, in order to generate consciousness about the problem of animal discrimination and demonstrate that all dogs are the same and, therefore, all dogs deserve a family.

Implementation:

We needed to launch the campaign the last week of October, when most social media conversation is about Halloween. So we contacted a pet costume store to make the costumes that our stray dogs would use.

According to the measurements of each dog and the shape of each face, we chose the breeds with which our “models” shared the most similarities, in order to make fitting costumes.

Timeline:

The video content was released on October 22 in Facebook primetime, without any investment in Facebook ads. The video is still being shared until today.

Placement:

The space of action of our campaign was the Malecón of Miraflores, the busiest place for people to walk their pets. We took the dogs throughout the week to capture the reactions of bystanders, and made a visual collection of them to launch the action as a branded content on our official Facebook page.

Business impact – sales, donations, site traffic

We earned 50% more fans on our fanpage.

Response rate

In less than a week, our video achieved more than 1 and a half million organic views, more than 55,000 shares, and reached more than 15 million people, on Facebook alone.

Impressions

We reached more than 10 million impressions in national and international media and generated US$1 million in free press.

Change in behavior

We increased pet adoption by 300% in our shelters.