If you love your pet (you do), you hate leaving them behind. But the reality is, when pet parents find a loving sitter on Rover — the world’s leading online pet sitter platform — our pets have the time of their damn lives. What better way to give pet parents peace of mind than to be reassured by the pets themselves?

Rover’s creative agency came to us with a script that had the insight to make the story from the pet's emotionally intelligent perspective. Pets reach out to their hoomans to let them know that it’s totally okay to “go do hooman thing” and not worry while they’re away.

The creative process began with a deep concept art and visual exploration phase. A big challenge was nailing the sense of a 'beginner's hand', continually asking ourselves how would a dog imagine this scene, while creating something beautiful to look at.

The artistic approach needed to feel like it came from a dog's brain — warm and enthusiastic, impulsive, misunderstanding of human conventions, and respectful of a dog's physical perspective. Decisions like giving “hoomans” long legs that are bigger than their heads was a way of flattening out the perspective that dogs see us from down low. Or, a “hooman” eating noodles with her hands out of a dog dish.

We also made the tool palette stuff that might fall off the kitchen counter — basic white paper, and two colors of Sharpie. The result feels charmingly confused and affectionate.

The client approached us with a loose script for each spot (we did a total of 11 videos!) and asked us to bring the pet's mind to life by injecting humor and cheeky moments through animation and design.

We explored forced perspectives that flatten out the low vantage point that a dog has; maybe humans should have triangular bodies and tiny heads! We worked hard to balance crudeness with a sensitivity that felt... doglike.

With tightly made animatics for each spot, we tried to break perspective as much as possible, and locked down the design from there. Once styleframes were approved, we moved into animation — and since we were using such a crude style — didn't differ too much from the animatics. From there, we aligned on a brush set to use and refined the animation, bringing in pops of Rover's green to subtly highlight the brand throughout.

The team worked on this project over the course of about 10 weeks using Photoshop, Toonboom Harmony, Animate + After Effects. The project was split into two phases, where we arranged the videos into priority order and staggered our deliveries into two bunches. The timeline included approximately two weeks of concept design, two weeks of animatics, two weeks of design and four weeks of animation.

This campaign had wide reach with placement on YouTube, social media, and TV. It was also picked up by numerous press outlets.

Within 6 weeks of launch, the campaign drove a +17% in brand awareness and +52% improved efficiency (CaC) on Linear TV. Conversions are up 150% YoY on YouTube. Best of all, overall bookings were up 20% YoY in Q3, based on Rover’s Q3 earnings report. As of March 26, 2024, the YouTube video has amassed 8,871,998 views.