Non-profit campaign, Pets Add Life (PAL), was established to raise awareness of the benefits of having a pet. They've been creating hilarious, viral social one-offs for years. While successful, they were struggling to effectively connect this fun and popular brand back to their greater purpose of guiding people to get a pet. Our goal was to create greater consistency and purpose for PAL, focusing on a longer-term game, rather than just racking up views.
Strategy
It was important to establish and maintain a multi-channel approach that:
-Leveraged PAL's historically strong channel followings on Facebook and YouTube – folks who mostly have and love pets already – by creating reasons to connect with them more frequently and promote engagement to increase post reach.
-Featured well-crafted bite-size content, tailored to each channel and audience, with clearer connective tissue and a more distinct and ownable POV from today's mass of pet cuteness.
-Regularly provided reasons to visit what was previously a stale, mission-based site, but now is a highly engaging place that connects visitors to the benefits of pets and even helps them on their journey to finding the right one.
While it wasn't possible to start with the full, complete brand ecosystem at once, we developed a foundation that would serve to build momentum and act as a starting point for iteration.
Implementation
Rather than just attaching a "get a pet" call-to-action to each piece of content, we took a different approach...
Introducing: The Committee for the Rapid Advancement of Pets. Who better to convince people they need pets in their lives than the pets who rule the internet?
These animals claim to have been behind every popular animal social post since Al Gore created the world wide web (they've been undercover for a really long time - hence the retro look and feel). They're an interspecies crack team made up of the best marketing minds around. Their organization believes that every American should have a pet in their lives.
The Committee acts as the center of the PAL universe. They get together on a regular basis to discuss ways of infiltrating the human psyche through their upcoming initiatives. This approach has granted us the permission to do crazy, original content that not only ties back to the mission of getting a pet, but actually provides people with ways to do so.
The first initiative launched in February, so the Committee came up with a genius idea for Valentine's Day – Pettable Arrangements. Just like the delightfully tacky fruit arrangements gifted across America on special occasions, but even better. Because it's pets! We created a comedic series, hosted by Hugo, the 2nd best pet arranger in the world, as he spreads his expertise to pet lovers everywhere.
Many more initiatives are on the way. The Committee for the Rapid Advancement of Pets campaign has provided an ongoing platform to showcase the most compelling reasons people should add a pal to their lives.
For the first campaign run, over time we received:
- Over a million Committee-based video views;
- An increase in site visitors of 40%, and;
- A massive reduction in site bounce rate (almost halved)
These results showed that the new strategic and creative foundation is working. This allows us to now take the Committee, and their future initiatives, from strength to strength, while further developing the PAL site to serve potential and current pet owners.
