Kids are a huge driving force behind families getting a dog. But with 70 million homeless dogs in America, not enough families are adopting rescue dogs. As a long-time advocate for dog adoption, Pedigree wanted to find a way to put rescue dogs at the top of kid’s wish lists.

To get kids pestering their parents to adopt a rescue dog, we used data to make kids the center of the adoption process – by turning their dog doodles into real adoptable dogs. Rescue Doodles is an interactive tool that uses AI to extract data from dog doodles, then matches them with similar looking rescue dogs available for adoption nearby. Kids / parents could text their doggy doodles to a Pedigree phone number. We then used AI and a machine learning model to identify the visual characteristics of the dog in the drawing and compare it with data from Adopt-a-pet.com (the largest adoption search engine) to find a nearby match. The matching dog was then texted back to the user with a link to adopt, creating a fun, fresh way to enter the adoption process.

To get more pets adopted, we used data gathering to creative a uniquely personal adoption experience that connected people with real rescue dogs. Our strategy was to target parents and get their kids to ask specifically for a rescue dog. We did this by tapping into children’s imaginations and letting them manifest they dog they’d like to adopt by drawing it. By using data to match their doggy doodles with real adoptable dogs, we literally brought their drawings to life.

The key to making Rescue Doodles a fun and effective experience was to make it feel like magic – simply text a dog drawing and receive a match of an adoptable rescue dog nearby. But to pull that off, a lot of data crunching happened in background. Once we received a doodle via text, the AI looked at the drawing to map out dog characteristics like fur color, shape of ears, tail, size etc. With this information, it would cross reference the Adopt-a-pet.com database to find a similar looking dog. Each time a user got a doodle match, we gave them a shareable asset showing their kid’s drawing and matching dog, so proud parents could share it on social.

So even if the user didn’t choose to adopt a dog, they were still spreading the word about dog adoption to others.

The campaign achieved 588 million earned media impressions and was picked up by outlets including ABC, NBC, People, Fox News, CBS and Cosmopolitan. Online visitors to dog shelters were up by over a million during the campaign period and Rescue Doodles led to over 18,000 successful matches. Most importantly, it educated children and parents on the power of adoption and proved that the perfect family dog is actually a rescue dog.