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This Dog-Food Brand Stuck Tiny Ads in Poop to Talk About Diet
Inside the down-and-dirty campaign by Walrus
Think of this as a What’s Your Poo Telling You? for dogs.
NYC agency Walrus placed tiny billboards in piles of poop left around town to promote dog food company, JustFoodForDogs. Much like humans, dogs can suffer from poor diets, and poop holds the answers. Some brave souls—an outsourced street team with steel stomachs, per Walrus—found varying shapes and colors of dog poop and placed billboards explaining what might be lacking in their diets.
“Soft poop means a dog’s diet needs work (plus, it ruins people’s shoes),” reads one ad. “Colorful is a doo doo don’t” and ” A kibble-based diet is proven to lead to overly large stools,” read others. Each billboard includes the JustFoodForDogs name and new tagline—”Fresh dog food made right.”
Click images to enlarge. (Poop is pixelated to protect the stomachs of those eating.)
“The brief was ‘Fresh dog food made the hard way,’ and what that means is that JustFoodForDogs cuts no corners in making its food,” says Deacon Webster, founder and CCO of Walrus. “When the agency came to me originally, I poo-poo’d the idea,” Steve Joyce, CMO of JustFoodForDogs, tells Muse. “But I quickly realized this was a great opportunity for a bit of real-world education.”
Other outdoor ads—not stuck in poop—are running throughout NYC and Brooklyn on bus shelters, taxi tops and billboards until January. One features a child’s drawing of a dog, noting that while nutritionists, veterinarians and toxicologists are on the JustFoodForDogs staff, artists are not.
Click the images to enlarge:
Poop ads were up for a week and eventually removed, along with the poop.
Did anyone advise the agency to steer clear of poop ads? “Oddly, no,” Webster says. “For some reason everyone thought this was a really great place to put ads.”
