This is yet another zoo story, the second this week, and it's another one about how much can be achieved with a little imagination and not much money.
It was a scheme cooked up by the Minnesota Zoo over the summer to promote the reopening of a nature trail of creatures found in the state, called the Minnesota Trail, and featuring gray wolves, which had been not on display while the trail was being renovated
A couple of weeks before the trail opened, posters began appearing on telephone poles around the Twin Cities, looking very much like those put up by people who had lost a pet.
They looked like real lost pet posters, with picture of pets and even descriptions. They weren't. They were intended as curiosity-builders.
At first just a few went up on the 20-some poles that were chosen for the campaign, then more appeared over the coming days, then more still. Soon the poles were covered with lost pet notices.
“At first you would kind of notice it, then later you’d say, ‘Wow, there’s a few pets missing,’" says Beth Kinney, a copywriter for the Minneapolis agency Kerker, which executed the campaign.
"Then you see the bunch and say, ‘Wait a minute, something’s going on.' People wondered who could have lost all these pets?"
Then a week before the trail was to reopen, teams went out and covered the poles and the scads of lost pet notices with signs reading, “The wolves are back,” and touting the reopening of the Minnesota Trail.
The theme of missing pets played off the wolves, which had moved elsewhere while the trail was being renovated.
"We thought we could make an impact without much financial investment,” says Kinney. The initial lost pet flyers were created using the pets of agency employees.
“Since the zoo’s a non-profit, we did the best we could with what we had,” she says. “You can print these off for like a nickel apiece at Kinko’s.”
