Dogs on Zoom
Mars Petcare, The PEDIGREE® brand
Issue 58 | March 2021
Agency
BBDO New York
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer, Worldwide David Lubars Executive Creative Directors Peter Kain, Gianfranco Arena Creative Directors Damjan Pita, Jim Connolly Art Director Bhanu Arbuaratna
Production Team
Agency, Director of Integrated Production David Rolfe Exec Producer Amy Wertheimer Producer Caroline Deason Interactive Executive Producer Katie Young Interactive Producer Chava Quinn
Other Credits
Snr Account Director Sally Nathans Account Director Elizabeth Maini Account Manager Isabel Pluck Account Executive Chelsea Berk Group Planning Director Annemarie Norris Planning Director Karin Santiago Comms Planning Director Brian Brydon Planner Jaime Chou
Date
May 2020
Background
Despite the fact that dog shelters in America went into lockdown with everyone else at the height of the pandemic, Pedigree wanted to maintain its campaign to end pet homelessness and connect rescue dogs with loving homes.
Idea
The popular video conference platform, Zoom, was repurposed to allow people to meet and adopt dogs from the safety of home. Pedigree partnered with nine shelters across the US to launch “Dogs on Zoom,” a series of virtual dog adoption events. People were invited (via social) to enter Zoom meetings showcasing adoptable dogs from local shelters. Multiple people were able to join and ask questions about the dogs, moderated by the shelter hosting the session. If an attendee was ready to adopt a dog or learn more, they could request and fill out an adoption form directly via the message feature. The Zoom meetings were also streamed on Facebook Live on Pedigree’s Facebook page to reach a wider audience that weren’t on Zoom.
Results
Over 9,900 people joined on Zoom and over 1.3 million people watched the streamed meetings on Facebook Live, leading to over 7,000 adoption enquiries. 64% of all the dogs featured were adopted. 131 million media impressions were generated, including features on Good Morning America, Fox News, NBC, Mashable, Timeout and Vogue. The initiative proved such a success it has been extended to markets in Latin America too.
Our Thoughts
2020 was the year in which the word Zoom became an eponym. Even if we do it in Teams or in Google Meet, we’re zooming.
From $68 a share in January 2020 to $360 in January 2021, the company has gone like a rocket not just because it is the easiest of the video comms apps to use (don’t get me started on how difficult Teams is to manage) but because they saw they could do more than facilitate business meetings. In February founder Eric Yuan offered Zoom for free to schools. 90,000 schools across 20 countries took up his offer and that is how, by March, the app had transformed into a place where people met in the evenings for drinks, where grandparents chatted to grandchildren and where, in May, abandoned dogs could find homes.