Doggone, an ad
campaign to drool over
Beneath a billboard of a Great Dane is a puddle
By Toni Fitzgerald
Feb 11, 2010
Walking along a side street you step in a puddle. No big deal, but as you look down you remember it hasn't rained in days.
As it happens, the puddle has pooled beneath a gigantic poster of a Great Dane. The dog's pink tongue flops out of his mouth, and he's drooling. It looks as though the drool is running down the poster into the pool on the ground.
The dog's eyes stare wistfully at something on the wall of the opposite building.
You follow his gaze and see a picture of a large bag of dog food.
You get it: The hungry dog is drooling over the vittles he sees just a few feet away.
The poster is an ad for Royal Canin dog food, dreamed up by its German agency, Heye & Partner GmbH in Hamburg.
The agency came up with the idea while trying to figure out a way to show how much dogs like the taste of the dog food. This particular brand of chow in the poster is specially formulated for Great Danes.
The agency booked two billboards directly across from each other on a small side street in Hamburg in December. Each billboard is more than 10 feet tall.
The drool effect was achieved by installing a canister filled with jam sugar, a clear preserve used by cooks when making jelly, below the picture. The jam sugar dripped out of a short tube beneath the poster, giving the effect of a puddle of drool.
The stunt works because it puts a new spin on an old medium, the billboard, by adding a new element. Like a billboard in Ohio last year that featured steam rising up from a pizza, it makes passersby do a double-take, wondering if what they just saw was just a coincidence or actually part of the ad.
In this case, a drooling dog is instantly recognizable, and very relatable for dog owners. Plus, the location of the billboards, on a side street of a residential neighborhood, makes it likely that they will be seen by their intended target, people taking their dogs for a walk.
The billboard is too new to have produced any uptick in sales yet, but it received coverage in more than a dozen ad blogs across the world, including Adsoftheworld.com, where the notoriously critical readers gave it a solid 6.6 out of 10 stars. Most campaigns get three or four.
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