The Dodo is the #1 most-engaged with media brand, owning the animal category across platforms. We’re a halo brand for everyone who loves animals -- from people who are obsessed with their pets all the way to committed animal advocates. We create fun, authentic, and meaningful content that not only entertains, but makes people feel connected to animals and empowered to help where it’s needed. We cater to a social, mobile-first audience and each piece of content is optimized to feel native to the platform.
In 2019, The Dodo partnered with Instagram to develop a new IGTV-first series specifically designed for teens, “You Know Me...Now Meet My Pet.” Our objective was to reach a new, younger audience of animal lovers by putting the spotlight on the beloved pets of Instagram’s most exciting young influencers. The partnership was announced onstage with Instagram at the “You Know Me...Now Meet My Pet” panel as part of “The Dodo Pet Zone” -- the first-ever pet-foused programming section at VidCon.
Each episode of the series was specifically built and optimized for an IGTV audience. Content was shot vertically on mobile by the influencers themselves to give audiences a behind-the-scenes look into their daily life with their pet, and we created an overall graphics package that felt fun, light and minimally produced.
To bring each episode of “You Know Me...Now Meet My Pet” to life, The Dodo team collaborated closely with each influencer to make their episode truly authentic, and to showcase their relationship with their pet in a fun, high energy, engaging way. Each influencer was asked a series of substantive questions about their relationship with their pet, like “how has your pet changed your life?” paired with a series of fun, quirky questions to really let their personality shine through — and of course to give them the opportunity to brag about their pet’s unique personality! Some of those questions included:
If you could ask your pet one question and get an answer what would it be?
If your pet had a human voice, what would it sound like?
What’s something you do with your pet that no one knows about?
Because we collaborated with influencers so closely on the creative for each episode, they were excited to promote their episode via Instagram stories to drive their audiences to view the episode, which in turn helped us meet our brand objective of bringing new, younger audiences of animal lovers to our page.
The Dodo also gave influencers a shot list, and asked them to share all their favorite videos and photos of their pet straight from their phone gallery so we could supplement this into their story and give a real “home video” feel to the final episodes.
In the end, each of the six episodes featured fun, relatable moments and heartwarming story arcs that left our audience feeling all the feels, from belly laughs to happy tears as they were introduced to the beloved pets of these influencers.
The Dodo successfully launched the six-episode series on July 17, 2019 and published weekly episodes with six popular Instagram influencers along with their beloved pets. Influencers included @thedrewlynch (500K followers) and his service dog Stella; @loren (18M followers) and her pomeranians @angelpom and @smudge; @laurdiy (5M followers) and her dog @moosetheminibully; @mahoganylox (1.4M followers) and her dog @pocketsthepuppers; @kristenmcatee (1.4M followers) and her dog @whereslink; and @adelainemorin (1.2M followers) and her dog @myfrenchienamedblue.
The series was a huge success for The Dodo, generating over 5M views on IGTV alone and over 11M views total across all of our social platforms (internal platform analytics, February 2020).
