Pedigree Million Dog Mosaic: Viral Winner
AWARD CATEGORIES: Best in Show; Viral Promotion (Winners); New Media (Winner)
CAMPAIGN: Pedigree Million Dog Mosaic
AGENCY: Catapult Action-Biased Marketing
CLIENT: Pedigree
In addition to feeding and pampering dogs, Pedigree has for years been in the business of helping man’s best friend find loving homes.
Last year, the work took a new turn when the company established the Pedigree Adoption Drive Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to helping both shelters and breed-rescue groups find good homes for dogs, With help from Catapult Action-Biased Marketing, the Million dog Mosaic promotion was launched to generate funding for the foundation.
A dedicated section of the Pedigree Web site became the rallying point to motivate thousands of people to show off their pets and help raise funds. There, people could upload photos of their dogs, which were then woven into a mosaic titled “Oliver” a cute puppy-face dog representing every canine hoping and waiting to be adopted. Each time a new photo was uploaded, Pedigree donated $1 to the foundation.
Word spread fast. More than 3,000 bloggers wrote about the Mosaic promotion, which ran from February through August, and Pedigree promoted it on its YouTube video channel. Thousands of Facebook friends shared the news. And Catapult made it easy to upload pictures, even via cell phones.
“We enabled those people who were enthusiastic and advocating this program with the tools they needed to go out and tell their friends and other people about it and that really accelerated the use of the mosaic,” Bill Hewson, president of Catapult Action-Biased Marketing Interactive, said.
During the Westminster Dog Show, a Pedigree pop-up shop opened in Times Square that housed a large LCD screen of the mosaic. E-mails were sent to an in-house list with exclusive offers to support the store and watch the Mosaic grow.
“It gave our consumers a chance to engage with the brand,” John Anton, the marketing director at Pedigree said. “People love their dogs, they want to share their pets with the world and donate to a worthy cause. It was more successful than we envisioned, which reinforces that dog lovers will embrace social media, particularly when it’s for a good cause—in this case helping dogs find homes.”
The Million Dog Mosaic Web site received about 1 million page views where 55,000 photos where uploaded (10,000 was the goal), resulting in a $55,000 donation by Pedigree to the foundation.
“This program tapped into a real human insight, people who own dogs love them so much and have such an emotional attachment,” Hewson said. “They love to show off their dogs. They have them on their screen savers and in their wallets.”
[Editor’s Note: The Pedigree Dog Adoption campaign was a 2008 Pro Award finalist in the Best Multidiscipline Campaign, Best Cause-based Promotion, Best Creative and Best Campaign Targeting a Micro Audience]
