Our mission was clear: Encourage dog adoption. But in order to do so, we needed to address one of the main reasons people don’t adopt dogs from a shelter: they aren’t purebred dogs. Lots of people discriminate mongrel dogs although they can be as good pets as dogs with pedigree. So, we decided to make a comparison between them to generate awareness about the importance of adopting dogs that are looking for a home.

We saw an opportunity: In Halloween month (October), people love to dress up their pets. So, we created purebred dog costumes to dress up the pets of the shelters, in order to generate consciousness about the problem of animal discrimination and demonstrate that all dogs are the same and, therefore, all dogs deserve a family.

We had a month to implement the idea. We needed to launch the campaign the last week of October, when most social media conversation is about Halloween. So we contacted a pet costume store to make the costumes that our stray dogs would use.

According to the measurements of each dog, we chose the breeds with which our “models” shared the most similarities, in order to make fitting costumes.

The activation ran from October 17 to October 20. We registered it on video and uploaded it as a branded content on October 22 in Facebook prime-time.

The space of action of our campaign was the Miraflores park, the busiest place for people to walk their pets. We took the dogs throughout the week to capture the reactions of bystanders, and made a visual collection of them to launch the action as a branded content on our official Facebook page.

Business impact – sales, donations, site traffic

We earned 50% more fans on our fanpage.

Response rate

In less than a week, our video achieved more than 1 and a half million organic views, more than 55,000 shares, and reached more than 15 million people, on Facebook alone.

Impressions

We reached more than 10 million impressions in national and international media and generated US$1 million in free press.

Change in behavior

We increased pet adoption by 300% in our shelters.

We knew we had to make the public to live a firsthand experience to achieve the necessary impact. We hit the streets with the puppies dressed in proper timing and people got the message beyond our expectations.

We brought to life the phrase “the medium is the message”. The dogs showed by themselves that they’re as lovely, playful and trained as the purebred ones, and it was possible to sensitize the public, reinforce the importance of changing mindsets and give the stray dogs a chance to show that they have nothing to envy to the purebred ones.

Target audience (consumer demographic/individuals/organisations)

Young people between 18 and 30 years old who have sensitivity towards animals; so they could help us spread the message to reach the people we wanted to change their mind.

Approach

In Peru, there are about 6 million stray dogs, but Peruvians prefer to buy pets instead of adopting, because more than 90% of shelter dogs are crossbred. And it’s purebred dogs that give them more social status. This has placed Peru as the country with the lowest rate of dog adoption in Latin America.

With that in mind, we decided to do something creative to compare the dogs and generate awareness about that all dogs are the same.

Situation:

In Peru, there are about 6 million stray dogs. Most of them manage to live on the streets, and the rest, hopefully expect to find a home while living in a shelter. Grupo Caridad is one of the most important NGOs dedicated to animal protection in the country. Currently, they have two shelters, where they take care of more than 170 rescued dogs.

Brief:

One of the toughest problems Grupo Caridad has to deal with is that the numbers of dogs they rescue is greater than the amount of dogs that people adopt. And because of that, sometimes they can’t even receive more dogs at the shelters.

Objective:

Tending so many dogs is logistically tough. Therefore, for Grupo Caridad to continue rescuing, it is necessary that people begin to adopt more dogs.