In France, Skoda still has to fight against injustice: suffering from a relatively bad brand perception, despite a strong quality/price ratio. But how do you fight against this when you’re ranked seventeenth on the market and have a significantly lower media budget? By never failing to surprise a public that doesn’t expect much from you. Luckily, with its unique way of paying attention to every little detail when conceiving its car models, Skoda actually offers much more than any French person expects from them. When we found out that the brand had thought about making a seat belt for dogs, we knew it represented a unique opportunity for us to highlight the both innovative and caring attitude it has to its customers, while engaging our audience with an emotionally-driven topic: the splendor and misery of owning a dog.

Because it has the habit of leaving nothing to chance, Skoda obviously had a solid reason to address dog owners: in the event of an accident at just 50km/hour, a dog turns into a one-ton deadly projectile. This is why we chose to highlight Skoda’s thoughtfulness by dealing with this worrying risk in a non-moralizing tone. How? Simply by telling the story of Doug the Dog and his master, a dog who weighs a ton but seems to be sorry about it. It’s not only a daily inconvenience but it can eventually cause serious damage. A slightly tongue-in-cheek approach, that leaves you puzzled until the final reveal.

In France, “Dogs” are a huge conversational subject on social media. Especially on Twitter where there are more than 1.3M tweets including the world “chien” (dog in French) and 76% of those tweets are re-tweeted.

So we were sure to create a conversational activation by launching our film on Twitter with a very direct hashtag : #DougTheDog.

In order to make a real blast at the launch we also proposed to the Twitter community to make the “Doug effect” on their dog pictures to turn them into one-ton dogs. When it comes to their dogs, people can get very involved! This was all we needed to make this activation viral.

We launched the activation on Wednesday March 13th with a first view format and the hashtag #DougTheDog as a trending topic.

The film was also broadcast on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.

For our influencer strategy, we worked with 4 dog-owning influencers, who shared our film on their Instagram stories for the launch.

A PR kit was also sent out the same day to 50 dog-owning influencers around France containing a personalized gigantic dog’s bowl. This resulted in some twenty Instagram stories on their account with the mention #DougTheDog.

The next day we published a Tweet Carousel featuring the best one ton dogs created during the activation.

In just one week we generated 7M views of the video, reaching a 3.4% engagement rate and gathered more than 40M media impressions.

The activation also led to more than 40 press mentions, both national and international, representing around 25M PR impressions (in one week). We overflowed the internet with our one ton dog!