The holidays are a crucial time for both online and brick-and-mortar retailers. Zappos saw this as an opportunity to stand-out from the noise of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Zappos and partners wanted to provide something special to our customers that money could not buy - the love that comes with rescuing a shelter animal.
To launch the Pawlidayz campaign, Zappos engaged with leading Pet Influencers across various social handles including Dogs of Instagram, Cats of Instagram, Nala Cat (3.3M followers), Lil Bub (1.5M followers) and more. We also teamed up with popular fashion blog Man Repeller to create an ownable editorial story within their "It's Kind of a Funny Story" section. The stories within this section are typically about how the author met their significant other, so we took the opportunity to flip the focus to share how the authors met their shelter pets.
Additionally, Zappos featured owned content on their social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube) over a two week period to amplify the campaign. Zappos shared the campaign widely internally, resulting in large employee engagement via Twitter using the hashtag #Pawlidayz. Through the implementation of our "Hit List", Zappos social accounts prompted 1,600 Zappos employees to reach out to their favorite celebrities/brands/CeWEBrities/etc., asking them to "Retweet" the Pawlidayz content. Employees were then given a range of prizes for the retweets they collected based on follower count and a number of other actions. This internal involvement assisted greatly with the overall marketing success of the campaign.
Outside of employee and user generated social content, Zappos teamed up with celebrity influencers Caesar Milan and Wynonna Judd to produce live streaming content. Overall the Zappos team produced over 36 videos targeting different segments of pet owners. Over 500 combined hours of production went into building the content and strategy for the Pawlidayz social campaign.
Over 9,000 shelter animals are euthanized every day across shelters in America and so through the Pawlidayz campaign, Zappos' goal was to rescue 9,000 animals nationwide. Through viral marketing and word-of-mouth, Zappos was able to exceed this goal as over 11,000 animals were adopted this year. Additionally, the campaign gained 218+ million social impressions.
