I got this great follow up to a video that we posted for Kim. If you remember, the winner was going to get $1000 for their animal charity! Well, they won!
When Park&Co President Park Howell announced we were hosting our first ever employees Film Festival competition, where our self-produced videos would be uploaded to You Tube for the world to see – AND the only strategy to win was to get the highest number of clicks – I knew instantly how to do it. Not just because I run the Film, Video and TV Department and have a lot of good friends in the biz who would surely help, but I’m also an animal nut. And what subject above any other gets forwarded by emails? Yep. Cute animal videos. I knew my good friends Sabrina, Courtney and Heidi – aka the Account Executive Team extraordinaire – would also be thinking along the same lines, so who better to team up with than them. We called ourselves the Bad Ass Babes. After Park’s meeting, we sat in Courtney’s office for about 30 minutes and had the whole plan laid out… A :30 parody of a Gap commercial, using dogs to lip sync to the words of Depeche Mode’s “I Just Can’t Get Enough”.
We started planning the shoot and called our friends; the Valley’s best DPs, Editors and Grips, and then we thought “how are we going to pay these guys?” and that’s when the masterstroke struck. We’d use the $1000 prize money and donate it to an animal charity. Our video would be forwarded to the world with the subject line “Dogs Helping Dogs”
The day of our shoot arrived and the dogs were bathed, brushed and made ready for the camera. We came into the Park&Co offices armed with peanut butter, carrots, cookies and yummy snacks with a good ‘crunch’. We built a very simple set and our good friend Howie Meyer, also a dog lover, started shooting. After a fun morning and several jars of Skippy later, it was in the can…. The tape was duped and the master sent to David Yasuda in CA who had agreed to do the edit.
We couldn’t wait to see how the piece had cut together, when David’s email came in with the QuickTime file attached, the girls got together, we played the video and knew we had a winner!
The race was on! The official opening to the Film Festival. All the videos were played and awards were given out for amongst others, Best Cinematography, Best Actor/Actress and Best Direction. I was struck by Kara Lebovitz’s fabulous piece called “The Method of Rhythm” and had a distinct feeling she would be our hottest competition…. We were then set free to our offices to upload the videos onto You Tube and to start spreading the word. Sabrina constructed a great email to accompany the link and out it went. “Dogs Helping Dogs” in the subject line, and our pledge of $1000 to charity if our video got the most clicks in our company competition… We posted it to every person in our work and personal address books, Sabrina posted it to her Facebook, Courtney and Heidi followed suit and we watched the numbers climb. We knew the boys in Interactive had plenty of clout in the social media forum, so we identified blogs and websites dedicated to animals, and within 2 weeks our video was being viewed in countries as far and wide as South Africa, The Netherlands and Australia, with links on the following:
1. AZ Central – MCDMOM Blog (AZ)
2. Animal Blog UK
3. Dogster.com
4. Odd Todd Blog (NYC)
5. Paul Linford Blog (UK)
6. Superhond (Netherlands)
7. (Still) Living in Oz Blog
8. SOS Animals Launge (Animal Rescue blog)
9. Facebook.com
10. Myspace.com
11. 4 The Love of Animals blog
12. Yahoo! Buzz, which posted it on animal lovers My Yahoo! sitesWe also had numerous dog-related Yahoo! groups working with us. Sending out daily reminders to their members to click the video. Rhodesian Ridgebacks are featured heavily in the piece and breed groups around the world started to take ownership of the piece and joined forces with us to ensure the dog’s video would win… Our team of 4 had grown tenfold and our viewings surged ahead, and after a 4-week posting, we ended up with 8350 clicks, with our nearest competition over 7000 clicks behind us!
We had won! Our $1000 will be donated to The Arizona Animal Welfare League/SPCA the state’s oldest and largest no-kill shelter which provides temporary homes for nearly 2,000 dogs and cats every year and offers medical and behavioral treatment for those in need.
Thank you to all our friends, family and the animal lovers who helped us with this great cause. And thank you Park, for the idea of the Film Festival which facilitated this donation. We are sincerely grateful.
Congrats to you! And I am happy to know that the animals are going to benefit from your creative video!
