Kids are a huge driving force behind families getting a dog. But with 70 million homeless dogs in America, not enough families are adopting rescue dogs. As a long-time advocate for dog adoption, Pedigree wanted to find a way to put rescue dogs at the top of kid’s wish lists.

To get kids pestering their parents to adopt a rescue dog, we made kids the center of the adoption process – by turning their dog doodles into real adoptable dogs. Rescue Doodles is an innovative, interactive mobile experience that matches children’s dog drawings with similar looking rescue dogs available for adoption. The experience was brought to life as a text chatbot where kids / parents could text their doggy doodles to a Pedigree phone number. We then used AI and a machine learning model to analyze the drawings and identify the color, shape and breed of the dog and match it with a nearby rescue dog. The matching dog was then texted back to the user with a link to adopt.

To get more pets adopted we harnessed the pester power of kids. Kids ask their parents for a dog 1500 times on average – our strategy was to get kids to ask specifically for a rescue dog. We did this by tapping into children’s imaginations and letting them manifest they dog they’d like to adopt by drawing it. By using data to match their doggy doodles with real adoptable dogs, we literally brought their drawings to life.

For the idea to work, it had to feel like magic – and mobile was the perfect medium – just text a dog drawing and receive a rescue dog back. But to pull that off, a lot of technical innovation happened in background. The experience was created as a chatbot, then once we received a doodle, the AI looked at the drawing to identify dog characteristics like fur color, shape of ears, tail, size etc. From this data it would search Adopt-a-pet.com (the largest rescue dog search engine in the US) to find a similar looking dog. Each time a user generated a doodle match, we gave them a shareable asset showing their kid’s drawing and matching dog, so proud parents could share it on social, and we could flood people’s feeds with user-generated doodle matches.

The campaign achieved 588 million earned media impressions and was picked up by outlets including ABC, NBC, People, Fox News, CBS and Cosmopolitan. Online visitors to dog shelters were up by over a million during the campaign period and Rescue Doodles led to over 18,000 successful matches. Most importantly, it educated children and parents on the power of adoption and proved that the perfect family dog is actually a rescue dog.