Celebrity Apprentice Follow-Up - Pedigree Dog Adoption Drive

Filed Under Pet Business Tips, Pet Events |



Celebrity Apprentice DogWell - I did make a point to watch the Celebrity Apprentice episode on Thursday night, but I have to admit I was a little disappointed. It was very dramatized and they spent less than 1/2 of the show actually working on the assignment.

They did have 2 teams - they had all men on one team and all women on the other - and each team was given the task to create a 30 minute commercial for the Pedigree Dog Adoption drive. The men were lead by Gene Simmons from Kiss and women were lead by Nely Galan - a TV executive. Each team had 8 hours to tape the ad and edit.

It was interesting to see the teams go about the task very differently - the women spent time planning and speaking with the Pedigree rep to find out their vision for the campaign. The men dived right in to making the video with no planning and didn’t bother to speak with Pedigree. The women worked as a team, getting everyone a task to complete. The men chose a director, Stephen Baldwin, and Gene and Stephen went ahead and completed the ad without much help from the rest of the team - they even sent the others home!

The learnings that I did take away from the show were that vital elements to a publicity campaign are to:

1) Appeal to your audience’s emotions

2) Make it real

3) Make good use of storytelling

4) Use star power / celebrity

Both the teams showed good dogs in bad situations that were given a good home and became members of the family. They used realism, storytelling and emotion - but the men got the upper hand and won the challenge through their choice to use Lennox Lewis (heavyweight fighter) as lead actor in their commerical.

To really do a better job I felt that they needed more time to research or at least discuss the demographics of pet owner or pet adopter market.

If you have any other learnings or comments please let us know by leaving a comment with this thread.



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Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Lorna Paxton on January 22, 2008 6:29 am

    Hi there,
    I am one of the owners of happytails Canine Spa line, spa, grooming & wellness products for dogs.

    Anyway, i’ve been reading your blog for about a month– thanks for putting out such great content. Your coverage of the celebrity apprentice show got me thinking…

    One fun idea you may want to recommend to your readers is a contest that we’re currently holding– called the Canine Celebrity Awards.

    Basically, you upload a photo or video of your dog. 6 winners will get vacations valued at $1000.

    How this relates to business is that the store (or organization) that is mentioned the most in the contest (when you’re filling out the online submission form it asks you to name your favorite store) will also win a vacation. No strings attached :)

    To learn more go to http://www.happytailsspa.com

    Thanks again for

  2. Danielle Chonody on January 22, 2008 12:49 pm

    Hi Lorna,

    Thanks for your feedback and I’m so excited to have helped to have been an inspiration for your competition. You have come up with a very unique way to encourage pet store/business owners to spread the word about the competition to their customers.

    I will put a post about here on working with pets in the next couple of days.

    Thanks for being a regular reader - hope you continue to enjoy working with pets.

    Danielle

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