The archive · PR & Stunts · Marketing decision · 2022
Pedigree's Rescue Doodles turns kids' dog doodles into matches with adoptable rescue dogs
Pedigree let children text their dream-dog doodles and used AI to match each drawing with a similar-looking rescue dog up for adoption.
Pedigree
What it had to solve
Pedigree wanted children to pester their parents into adopting a rescue dog instead of buying one. The catch: children were usually spectators in the decision, with no way to make a case for a particular dog.
How it works
Pedigree's problem was not awareness but voice. To get children pestering their parents to adopt a rescue dog, the brand had to give kids something parents could not argue with — yet in most families the adoption decision belongs entirely to adults.
Rescue Doodles made the child the centre of the process. Children or parents texted their dog doodles to a Pedigree phone number, and AI with machine learning read each drawing for colour, shape and breed. The doodle was then matched with a similar-looking rescue dog available for adoption nearby — so the dog a child had drawn appeared to exist, and it was adoptable.
The match turned an abstract appeal into a family conversation with a specific dog in it. D&AD carries the work in its awards archive under PR; the page records no adoption numbers, so what is documented is the mechanism: a child's imagination became the most persuasive adoption listing of all.
Why it lands
- The child, not the advertiser, becomes the advocate — and a kid pestering for a specific drawn dog is harder for parents to dismiss than a poster.
- Matching the doodle to a real lookalike makes the fantasy concrete: the dream dog exists, it is nearby, and it needs a home.
- AI analysis of colour, shape and breed makes the pairing feel personal rather than generic, so each match is unique to that child.
- Putting children inside the decision upgrades an ad into an activity, giving the family a reason to visit a rescue dog they now feel they have met.
What it did
The tool changed who argues for adoption: a child's drawing became a concrete reason to choose a real rescue dog rather than a hypothetical plea from an ad. D&AD carries the work in its awards archive under PR; the page records no adoption figures, so the documented outcome is the mechanism itself.
What you can take
Give the person with no buying power a role in the decision: a child's own drawing becomes the argument that turns a family toward adoption.
Since then
The campaign entered the D&AD awards archive under PR as a reference for making the audience's own creativity do the persuasion. The page records no adoption or match figures, so the legacy is the mechanism: a brand that stopped telling families to adopt and instead let a child's drawing pick the dog, turning the adoption process into a game only a rescue dog can win.
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