Making something totally unrelated to my business be relatable.

I recently entered my dog in an amateur race for sighthounds. He is an Italian Greyhound who loves chasing things. We bring him to a hobby farm about once a month where he gets to race against his other other Italian Greyhounds buddies. They chase a squeaky toy on a robe for 200 yards and run to their heart's content. Extra bonus is the playtime and snuggles with people and dogs between races. 

This year’s Nationals not only happened to be in Minnesota, but at the exact farm we’ve been going to this past year. So we signed our pup up!

With signing up for the races also came the option of buying an ad in the nationals catalog, honoring beloved pets who have passed, celebrating the titles of current racers, and promotion of dog related businesses. 

I had just started my brand new business C42 a few months prior and decided I could use a little extra exposure outside of my current client bubble. But how do I promote my branding and design business that has nothing to do with dogs, to an all dog loving crowd, in a racing dog catalog? I can’t just put my logo up there with a cheesy slogan and hope someone looks me up online. I want people to actually pay attention to my ad. Make it memorable and relate to the dog racing event. 

I decided to take inspiration from those articles in the physical Wired magazine that are actually sneaky ads. They are designed and layed out like articles only to find out a few paragraphs in, you’re not actually reading a wired article, but you’re reading an ad. The problem with these hidden advertisements is that as soon as you realize you’re not reading your regular article, you feel deceived. At least I do! I feel gullible and stop reading and start looking for the tiny text in a corner of the page that says branded content… and I’ll feel even more stupid for missing that. Ok, ok, I’m taking this a little personal! But the point being, I don’t want to deceive, I want to lure in and entertain! It has to be worth the read for a laugh so the reader will actually make it all the way through the end, feeling humored and hopefully inspired to give me a call for some help with promoting their business. 

To make it relate with all the dog content in the catalog, I set it up to look like my dog took out the ad and was being interviewed on why he did it. I promote my services through my dog's perspective. The whole ad looks like an article, a big headline accompanied by a picture of Apollo and I in my studio that could have been snapped by the reporter. 

You can read the article here: Apollo the Italian Greyhound takes out ad in the NATIONALS Catalog

During nationals I got some laughs and nice feedback from people who had peeked into the catalog between races. I also noticed a spike in visits to my website during the day of the event. 

Apollo also did great, he took home 3rd prize and played almost non stop with his Italian greyhound best friend Blitzen. He slept the entire car ride home curled up in my lap.