In 2013, the New Zealand Government passed a new law to curb the sale of synthetic recreational drugs, ‘party pills’, by pushing the producers to safety test them on dogs.

Animal-rights activist group, Paw Justice, was desperate to pressure the Government to review the law, but couldn’t fund an extensive above-the-line campaign. They had to rely on PR and social media to rally Kiwis together and make the government take notice.

How do we grab the public’s attention? We staged a world-first Animal Strike and let our furry friends protest on behalf of New Zealand dogs.

For one day, we blocked the animal content people love.

We collaborated with YouTube, Google, local TV stations and websites to block everything from singing cats to skateboarding dogs. We then encouraged the public to sign the petition and download the strike toolkit to block their own animal content. No selfies with your poodle Paul, or pics of your new kitten Cathy – they were all on strike.

And news media couldn’t get enough, sharing our story through the country’s biggest news organisations, pushing our key messages about the inhumane practice of lab testing on dogs.

For an investment of less than $5,000, this campaign not only reached a potential audience of over 22 million people, it generated enough groundswell to influence the people who matter.

Because of this campaign, the New Zealand Government is now reviewing this law. Woof!

We all love being entertained by animals online but when it comes to watching hard-hitting animal-rights PSAs most people turn away. So instead of showing the public something they didn’t want to see, we got their attention by taking away what they love, as well as allowing people to spread our strike message by giving them the tools to block animal content themselves. All mediums worked together seamlessly to create the strike, gain awareness and spread our petition all at the same time.

Most importantly we achieved our goal. Through public pressure from the campaign the government was forced to review the law and they are looking at an amendment right now.

Over 350% more petition signatures then we had aimed for,

A potential reach of over 22million,

#animalstrike trended on twitter for the day.

Paw Justice is one of the most popular facebook page in New Zealand, second only to countries favourite sports team, the All Blacks.

When we submitted our entry for the Paw Justice Animal Strike held on September 26th 2013 that, we were able to demonstrate New Zealanders and their pets standing united and voicing their outrage to ban party pill testing on animals in Zealand. Paw Justice collected over 58,000 signatures in one day, which was then presented to Parliament. Since then the New Zealand Government has been in the spotlight and put under immense pressure to amend the bill allowing testing. It was announced today by the New Zealand Prime Minister John Key that due to this overwhelming response that this law has now been changed.

This is a phenomenal result.