First dog's press conference

Insights, Strategy & the Idea: Viasat is a leading paid satellite TV operator competing with 3 other players in its category constantly expanding the market share of paid satellite TV. The communication goal was to drive broad public awareness of Cartoon Network launch. The marketing goal was subscription sales targets. The Agency was asked to come up with ideas within a limited budget of just $5K. Having checked all the content of the Cartoon Network in Ukraine, we learned that the only “fresh” cartoon was Scooby Doo. The obvious solution was to generate buzz. And we decided to act as if we really have news. We had enough money to organize decent press-conference, so all the fun was to happen there. The main challenge was to create an event visited by maximum journalists, give them a brilliant material to tell the country about.
Creative Execution: Instead of usual “spokesmen” we brought in «spokesdogs»–Scooby Doo Crew, presenting the project to journalists and answering their questions. We named it the World 1st Dogs’ Press-Conference. Journalists were stunned with the idea and the opportunity to interview the Scooby Doo crew (real trained dogs). The “translation” was realized by the Interpreter from «dog » to «human» language – a Client Viasat representative. We all knew that it will be a real newsmaking event, and it did attract so many journalists, we could hardly fit into the country’s biggest press-room – UNIAN (usually allocated for the President, Prime-Minister and other VIP news events) Dogs one after another answered journalists with barking, whining, wagging or waving paws - the interpreter translated everything to “human language”. It took 1 hour to give away all the signatures requested by journalists! And of course everyone wanted to take a photo of our celebrity dog-crew.
Results and Effectiveness:
• 6 Google pages in Ukrainian with unique links, photos etc.
• Top news sites http://korrespondent.net/, http://www.natali.ua/, http://kino.open.ua/,http://www.telekritika.ua/, http://www.ukrbiz.net, http://kiev.afisha.ua/, http://odessa.info/
• National TV show “Good morning, Ukraine!”
• 9 most popular offline magazines («Liza», «Telenedelya», «TV Park», «ТV Ekran», «Serial», «Ukraina Moloda», etc.).
• For 5K$ and 0 media investment we made Cartoon Network Channel launch a big deal! The subscriptions sales plan for September, 2010 was fulfilled at 129%. Cartoon Network in Ukraine became the The first TV channel ever launched by pets. Scooby-doooby-doooooo!