The media innovation behind Adoption Live permanently upgraded Finland’s digital outdoor advertising network.

Adoption Live was based around a livestream that brought homeless cats closer to potential urban adopters. The campaign required us to innovate the livestream’s distribution and integrate it to outdoor advertising for maximum impact. By revamping the coding of the digital outdoor advertising platform and connecting it to the county’s extensive 5G network, digital billboards around Finland are now livestream-compatible.

The livestream ran in hundreds of digital billboards around Finland’s cities, turning the billboards into direct windows to the remote shelters and doubling Finland’s cat adoptions.

Finland is going through a cat crisis. Every year 20 000 cats are abandoned or born in the wild. Domestic cats are never meant to live in the wild, but Finland’s harsh winters make the situation even worse. The freezing temperatures that last for months are a death sentence to the cats.

Musti Group is the Nordic’s largest pet care specialist. Very few business areas are based on emotion, love and trustworthiness more than the pet care industry. That’s why Musti Group’s brand building is done through campaigns and actions that show how much they care about all animals – their customers’ pets and other animals as well.

The Finnish Animal Welfare is an association that Musti Group supports continuously, and the cooperation is valued by their customers. During the coronavirus pandemic many people took pets that they abandoned soon after, causing animal shelters around the country to go over capacity. As the winter months were approaching, it became clear that the Finnish Animal Welfare did not have room in their shelters to rescue any more wild cats from the freezing temperatures. More adoptions were needed, and that’s where Musti Group realised it could be of help.

As part of their brand marketing, Musti Group regularly collaborates with the Finnish Animal Welfare. This often means providing resources such as pet food, but now the association was facing a more serious and intangible problem. Due to the worsening cat crisis in Finland, all their cat shelters were full beyond capacity.

While Finns love cats, most people consider cats rescued from the wild to be antisocial and undesirable as pets. However, this preconception is not true. Shelter cats adapt well to home environments and make lovely pets.

Proving this fact and changing people’s preconceptions was the true challenge of the campaign. Simply raising awareness of the problem and appealing to people’s goodwill wouldn’t convert to adoptions. People had to see how shelter cats are truly like – not in polished advertising, but in real life. Still, the campaign had to use paid media to gain wide enough exposure.

To increase the amount of cat adoptions people had to be exposed to the everyday lives of shelter cats. This way, their potential as pets would become evident to them. Also, the complicated adoption process should be made easier to start.

We quickly realised that a livestream from a shelter would be the only way to present the cats authentically and believably. But a simple webcam stream on social media wouldn’t do.

We had to innovate the livestream’s distribution to uncharted territory and get the potential urban adopters talking. We decided to aim for something that seemed impossible just a few years ago, and implement the livestream into every single digital billboard in cities around Finland.

Finland is a frontrunner in 5G technology, so the bandwidth was there. Still, the plan required us to partner up with the outdoor media companies and pioneer new code into the DOOH network’s system.

Finnish cities have mostly small apartments, making cats popular options as pets. By default, urban digital outdoor advertising would reach the most potential target demographic.

We decided to present the homeless cats as cute and potential pets looking for a loving home – not as something to feel sorry for, as that would only reinforce the perception of them being any different to other acquirable pets.

To really get people to form attachment towards the cats, we decided to broadcast the stream 24/7, totally dominating the cities for two weeks. Each cat would also have their name and information visible on the stream, making them feel like their own personality.

The call to action was simple: Take me home. We also reminded potential adopters that by freeing up space in the shelters, the Finnish Animal Welfare would be able to save more cats from the wild before the deadly winter.

Adoption Live was streamed from the largest cat shelter in Finland. Each cage in the shelter was equipped with a robotic camera, between which the directors of the stream alternated during the stream.

The stream launched in the beginning of November 2023 on digital billboards around the largest cities in Finland. Several hundred stand-alone billboards, bus shelters and larger digital outdoor billboards broadcasted the livestream around the clock for two weeks. With the new 5G connections and the pioneering code in place, the video quality stayed crisp throughout the stream, with no buffering or downtime.

Each execution included a QR code, with which the viewer could instantly start the adoption process of the cat they wished to provide a home for.

Adoption Live was an immediate success. Already on its very first day the adoption applications started flooding in at record pace. Overall, the Finnish Animal Welfare saw an increase of 147% on adoption applications, boosted by the possibility of starting the process directly from the livestream. Additionally, the traffic of the old, official adoption website increased by 91%.

Cat adoptions more than doubled during and after the Adoption Live campaign. This means that thousands of homeless cats found a loving home, but also that the Finnish Animal Welfare was able to save thousands of new cats from the wild. Just in time for the coldest Finnish winter in decades.

Musti Group also received their share of the love. The livestream generated more than 10 million impressions, boosting their brand awareness by 31%, brand preference by 22% and brand consideration by 33%.