Roles
Creative lead, creative concepting, digital strategy, copywriting, presentation development
Components
Spec designs and ecosystem representing site, social, mobile
Concept
In 2010, the MRM team was invited to imagine how a full digital ecosystem for Long Live Your Dog might take shape. Our vision combined a fresh new look with a dispersed experience that lived in social, mobile and offline environments, all of which was aggregated on the site and then redistributed. While it was never built - the Chows instead underwent a complete rebranding that went live in 2012 - it is still work of which I am extremely proud.
Although we planned for most interactions to take place away from the actual longliveyourdog.com site, we wanted to take advantage of the site as an anchor where we had complete creative control and could aggregate both static content that doesn't live well socially - like product details and training articles - and the myriad activity out in the wild.
The concept was built around 'dog moments,' the very thing the brand helped deliver, captured as stories, photos and videos. We envisioned a showpiece 'wall' where all of the moments shared, regardless of origin, could be compiled and explored.
With 20,000 plus dog profiles already in the existing Dog Park, we knew we could launch with scale.
Facebook, with its enormous reach, active users and similar focus on 'moments of life' was envisioned as the living, beating heart of the community. Photos posted here would flow to the site; content posted in other channels like YouTube and Twitter would be redistributed here.
We proposed a mobile app that would integrate with smartphone cameras and let users quickly caption the dog moments they wanted to share in the 'Long Live..." format, then share them with the community. The app would also allow users to see what others were sharing.
YouTube would be built as a repository for all things video, as well as serving as a social network and content consumption platform in its own right - searches for 'dog videos' on YouTube dwarfed those on even Google, we learned.
Because social is a mindset, not a media platform, we looked for other places to make dog moments social and shareable, like at the Dog Nights held at many major league ballparks - the plan was to show these moments taken by fans with their dogs, and also distribute them throughout our ecosystem.
We looked for ways to be relevant in more dog/owner moments, such as when the dog comes home for the first time. Why not explore a partnership with a retailer who already sells hundreds of millions of dollars of Dog Chow and Puppy Chow and create a 'new dog' registry?
Finally, we proposed having a real live dog on the Purina campus (it's a dog-friendly workplace), perhaps a brand member's pet, tweet its daily routine. We suggested tagging all the objects in its play area with RFID tags and putting a receiver on the dog's collar; whenever the dog interacted with a toy, or food bowl, or bed, a tweet would fire off.
