Taking inspiration from online puppy stores that offer next-day delivery, our campaign upped the ante with the launch of a new same-day service called “Same Day Pups.” We created a launch video, a website (SameDayPups.com) and used paid social, search, display media and targeted video to drive prospective puppy purchasers to the site.

To everyday Internet users, it all looked real. But once people landed on SameDayPups.com and clicked, or tried to navigate deeper into the site, they were met with the truth about puppy mills and were redirected to DontBuyIntoPuppyMills.com, which educated consumers on how to ethically obtain a puppy.

Making the most of a fairly lean media budget, we placed fake banner advertisements for Same Day Pups on popular puppy-related sites, purchased ads targeting top search terms used by prospective puppy purchasers, and promoted the video on social media and through PR.

After only five weeks, we had delivered a total of 28 million media impressions and had over 111,000 unique visitors to our sites. Search ads for SameDayPups.com dominated the results of the most popular online puppy buying keywords, which intercepted 65,000+ clicks via Google search.

But perhaps our proudest achievement was one of our smaller numbers: the 42,859 people who attempted to buy a puppy online and instead spent quality time on our Don’t Buy Into Puppy Mills campaign page. These were people well on their way to buying a puppy online, and we got our message to them loud and clear. It’s the closest we’ve come to the ultimate, yet impossibly elusive metric: puppies saved.