Creative to give you paws: Tractor takes Woof Project's new campaign to drive dog adoptions nationwide

Woof Project has brought this possibility to life, with a fun new campaign that serves a serious purpose: to encourage the adoption of South Africa’s unwanted, abandoned and abused dogs. Woof Project is a pop-up adoption initiative powered by Oscars Arc, a registered non-profit organisation (NPO) that sources details of the dogs up for adoption from various shelters, and sets out to help give them the exposure they need to find a loving home.

Woof’s latest campaign showcases potential adoptees in eye-catching creative, styled as celebrities – from Ed Sheeran, to Floyd Mayweather and Marilyn Monroe – with the aim of gaining eyeballs and thus driving new adoptions. Leading outdoor media owner Tractor Outdoor has taken the fresh visuals nationwide, flighting the campaign across its country-wide network of digital out of home (DOOH) billboards on a pro-bono basis, with a media value to the tune of around R1m.

Explains Remi du Preez, commercial director at Tractor Outdoor: “Woof is innovative, creative and relentless in its quest to give the dogs it represents a loving home.

“We loved the creative and felt that it would work beautifully as an outdoor campaign. DOOH is a high-frequency, high-reach and high-impact medium that is ideal for a campaign of this nature, which needs as much exposure as possible to deliver on its goal of driving dog adoption.

“Each billboard image is fitted with a QR code. Upon scanning the code, the user is taken directly to a vetting application form that they need to complete to adopt the dog on the screen,” he explains.

Woof Project supplies Tractor with up to 15 new dogs per week, which are added to the media owner’s network flighting schedule, and subsequently broadcast across screens located at high-traffic locations in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.

Du Preez explains that when a dog is adopted, they are simply removed from the screens and replaced with another seeking a home. “The instantaneous and dynamic nature of DOOH allows for the quick turnaround of creative, according to the campaign’s needs.”

Says Joanne Lefson, director at Oscars Arc: “Dog shelters in South Africa are inundated with unwanted dogs – pure breeds, mixed breeds and everything in between!

“The ongoing challenge of shelters is to find creative ways of inspiring the public to adopt, and then creating maximum awareness to increase the chances of interest.”

She says that Tractor Outdoor’s commitment to helping the cause has been a game changer for the NPO: “Having the opportunity to engage Tractor’s network has allowed us to share our message across the country and ultimately save thousands of dogs’ lives while enhancing the lives of the families that chose to adopt as a direct result of the campaign.”

Lefson adds that the campaign feedback has been fantastic, and that the NPO is already seeing an increase in new adoption applications.

Says Du Preez: "We consistently aim to look outside of ourselves to see how we can use our business as a force for good, uplifting the worthy causes of NPOs that do not always have the resources to create the widespread awareness they desperately need.

“To have longevity as a business, we need our community and all of our stakeholders to flourish too; whether they be human or animal.”