Dogtoys.nl is an initiative of Nadine Heesters, a fervent dog lover. She felt that pet stores offered too few great dog toys. Next to modelling work, she therefore started Dogtoys.nl where dog owners find fun playthings. Thus the pay-off: keeps your dog smiling.Dogtoys is known to a small group of clients that introduce a new client every now and then. But Nadine wanted more, so how do we draw new prospects to dogtoys.nl with a very limited budget?

Objective: 50 visitors per day, the week following the campaign (normally 30).

We chose the week before pets’ day as promotional period. To get attention of owners, we couldn’t ignore the dogs. Because if the dog likes it, the owner will certainly follow.The most common dog toy is the tennis ball. So we used that as the medium. We spread 500 tennis balls throughout four parks in Amsterdam. When a dog picked up a ball and brought it to its owner, he read the following text: buy something different for a change.

Followed by the URL and pay-off: Keeps your dog smiling. That makes the owner smile too.

In the week following the start of the promotion, the average number of visitors per day was 93 with a peak of 134 visitors on the first day of the promotion.Since then, the average number of visitors has been 40 per day.

There were many spontaneous, cheerful responses from owners and their dogs. The promotion also received attention on various weblogs.