Phillips 66 - "Victory"

Carmichael Lynch took home Adweek’s 2020 Media Plan of the Year award for its National #MakeADogsDay campaign for Subaru in the Best Cause Marketing Category. Adweek’s annual Media Plan of the Year Awards celebrate the year’s most creative media plans and executions from around the globe.

Subaru’s partnership with the ASPCA dates back to 2008, but its 2019 effort for the association trotted out some fresh new tricks.

For its “Make a Dog’s Day” campaign, Carmichael Lynch took the association to the next level, designating Oct. 22, which fell during Subaru Loves Pets Month, as a national holiday. The work promoted the adoption of shelter dogs while replacing Subaru’s cars on its homepage with “underdogs”—shelter dogs that are harder to find a home for because of their age, disabilities or other reasons—featured in a national out-of-home campaign.

The campaign included a partnership with National Geographic and renowned photographer Vince Musi, who captured the personality of Subaru’s “underdogs” with vivid portraits. Subaru’s 24-hour National Geographic Instagram takeover garnered 4.2 million likes, making it Nat Geo’s most successful partnership of 2019.

The effort also targeted audiences early in the day and included partnerships with Good Morning America and the Today show, first-view placement on Twitter and a promoted #MakeADogsDay hashtag. This fetched 4 million likes, 76,000 mentions of the hashtag and 98% positive sentiment. Half of those mentions referenced Subaru, and the effort helped generate 20,000 searches for “Subaru dogs” on Oct. 22. Meanwhile, a homepage takeover on Amazon was viewed by roughly 80 million customers, leading to $164,000 in donations to the ASPCA on the platform.

“It’s really simple, but it has an important mission,” Carmichael Lynch media director Neil Goodspeed says. “It’s a good reminder that simple works when you have a strong and pure objective like this.”

Best of all, the effort delivered on its objective, as thousands of dogs found homes.

Read the Adweek coverage here.

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