Droga5 laid a scented trail through SoHo so dogs led owners to Petco's Reddy

Announce the grand opening of Reddy's first bricks-and-mortar concept store in SoHo, New York, and drive pet parents through the door.

An OOH trail dogs can read: scented wild postings and paw-print decals that trigger a dog's tracking instinct — ending at the store door.

Scented wild postings and guerrilla paw-print decals formed a route through SoHo with playful captions about each dog's newfound obsession; on opening day a parade of dogs walked the trail from Washington Square Park to the store.

The trail funneled walkers and their dogs directly to the new storefront on opening weekend; the material reports no footfall or sales figures.

When Petco opened the first concept flagship for Reddy, its premium lifestyle brand for dogs, in SoHo, Droga5 New York didn't buy posters for humans — it bought smells for dogs. The agency built a 'scent-sory' tour through the neighborhood: a concentrated formula of fragrances attached to OOH wild postings and guerrilla 'paw print' pavement decals, laid out to switch on a dog's tracking instincts and lead pets, and the people holding their leashes, straight to the new store.

The insight was that smell sits at the center of how dogs experience the world, and that owners usually hurry them past it — walks optimized for the destination, not the journey. Messaging along the route poked fun at each dog's sudden fascination with the pavement while teasing what awaited at the destination, turning the daily walk itself into the ad format.

To make the trail visible to humans too, a parade of dogs walked it from Washington Square Park through SoHo to the Reddy storefront on opening day over the weekend.

It inverts OOH: instead of designing for the human holding the leash, it designs for the nose on the other end — and lets the dog do the targeting.

The media and the message are the same object; the paw-print route is simultaneously ad, experience and directions to the store.

The insight (dogs see through scent, owners rush the walk) gives a pet brand a credible reason to exist on the pavement at all.

The dog parade converts a stunt into an opening-day event with earned-photo potential.

Advertise in the medium your end user actually perceives: for a dog product, a scent map is more native than any billboard a human might read.

The scent trail ran around the store's opening weekend in November 2021. LBB's write-up drew a modest audience, and the material reports no follow-up figures for the store.