null - Ad Council's The Shelter Pet Project - Start A Story. Adopt.

We challenged the misperceptions by providing examples of shelter pets that are perfect, healthy and happy. Pets that everyone knows and loves. The most famous dogs and cats today aren’t coming from Hollywood; they’re coming from the internet. Videos of dogs and cats can have millions of views. There are pets with millions of fans, followers and likes. Today, there are cat film festivals, pet agents and celebrity pet products. Many of these celebrity pets started as shelter pets. We used the stories of celebrity pets and influencers to encourage people to tell their shelter pet adoption stories and create awareness and a movement toward adopting shelter pets. We began the campaign featuring the stories of our three celebrity pets: Keyboard Cat (8+ million views on YouTube), Toast (325k+ followers on Instagram), and Hamilton (82k+ followers on Instagram). We leveraged the social media channels of over 70 cause supporters, both pets and humans, to support the campaign by telling their story of adopting a shelter pet. And at every touchpoint we encouraged people to share their stories in social media with hashtag #startastoryadopt.