Crazy Pet Owners - Mars Petcare USA

Background

The PEDIGREE Super Bowl ‘Crazy Pet Owners’ campaign was designed to renew interest in PEDIGREE and its Adoption Drive to find homes for over 4 million dogs abandoned each year in the USA.

The campaign needed to get extra leverage from an irreverent Super Bowl TV commercial starring unmanageable “crazy” pets, giving it an online life beyond TV through which user engagement could lead to greater food donations to the sheltered dogs through the PEDIGREE Adoption Drive Foundation.

Idea

A hilarious microsite was created which showed tongue-in-cheek behind-the-scenes documentaries about the crazy pets shown in the commercial, Rusty the rhino, Bruno the ostrich and Max the bison. Each concluded with the tagline: Maybe you should get a dog.

For every ad and video viewed, PEDIGREE donated a bowl of food to a shelter dog.

The campaign was promoted by PR and distributed virally across the web with Facebook videos, via Twitter and an iPhone application as well as by paid search. Content was also available across post-game online channels including Yahoo! And YouTube.

Result

PEDIGREE surged to its highest-ever dollar sales and highest-ever volume gains. In total, 2,243,847 videos were viewed, which equates to the same number of bowls of dog-food that were donated to animal shelters across the country.