2026 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

This entry is an outstanding example of social/conversational strategy because it jumped on a timely, controversial cultural moment and turned it into immediate, measurable adoption action during a national animal welfare crisis.

Humane Canada strategically newsjacked Sabrina Carpenter’s album launch, where fandoms, pets and mass attention converged, to break from traditional crisis-driven appeals and mobilize a disengaged younger audience.

Yet, every day, across Canada, families are facing agonizing choices: surrender a beloved pet just to afford rent or cover the next household bill. Economic strain and housing instability are pushing pet surrenders to record highs across the country, while also making it more challenging for people to adopt. In just the first six months of 2025, Toronto Humane Society saw pet surrender rates jump 28%.

Despite urgent calls from Humane Canada and its member organizations across national and local media, polycrisis fatigue has left many Canadians (particularly younger audiences) burned out and increasingly disengaged from the news, or actively avoiding it altogether, making it harder than ever to capture public attention.

When you understand Gen Z and Millennial pet-lovers in Canada (the generations who statistically show strongest intent to adopt pets), you’ll understand that the standard pet adoption crisis messaging wasn’t failing to drive action because they didn’t care; it was failing because it didn’t speak to our audience in a way they would receive it, and messages only lived in the spaces younger audiences were actively disengaging from.

This unearthed the untapped opportunity. The cultural spaces where Gen Z and Millennials do show up, participate, and mobilize are fandom-driven communities, which would have the power to drive real action and allow them to reframe adoption from moral obligation to cultural participation.

To authentically enter fandom culture, they needed to find a moment where fandom, pets, and mass attention were colliding. Sabrina Carpenter was dominating the news and social media chatter after teasing her controversial album cover for her soon-to-be-released Man’s Best Friend album, featuring the artist in a dog-like pose on all fours.

So they created the “Man’s True Best Friend” adoption campaign. They recreated the album cover, swapping Sabrina Carpenter for adoptable dogs with a QR code that directed Canadians to adopt.

To activate “Man’s True Best Friend”, they launched a national campaign across OOH, PR and social media, designed to align directly with a live cultural moment by mirroring the codes used in album release campaigns and translating attention into adoption action.

OOH placements were strategically selected to coincide geographically and temporally with album-related media activity, including a 90-foot high-visibility placement adjacent to Sabrina Carpenter’s album launch takeover at Dundas Square in Toronto.

They mirrored real fandom listening behaviours by placing campaign ads on Spotify at the exact moment Canadians were streaming Sabrina Carpenter’s album on release day, intercepting attention where fans were already primed for discovery.

On Instagram, Humane Canada’s owned post leveraged a top-trending track from the album, Manchild, to increase native engagement and discoverability on the algorithm among Sabrina’s fanbase.

The agency then activated highly engaged Sabrina Carpenter fan pages by tagging and directly messaging them, prompting organic amplification as fandom accounts shared the post and tagged the artist. This collective fan-driven amplification organically reached Sabrina Carpenter herself, resulting in her reposting the Humane Canada Instagram post and expressing support to her 50M global followers, propelling the campaign to viral scale.

The objective was to increase pet adoption rates across Humane Canada member organizations in 2025, with a KPI of reaching at least 28% of animals adopted compared to previous years. The campaign ultimately delivered a 58% increase in overall adoptions over the three-year average.

“Man's True Best Friend” drove direct adoption of the dogs featured across its digital, social, out-of-home and website assets, with the KPI of getting a portion of the featured dogs adopted. Ultimately, all of the dogs featured in the campaign were adopted.

The campaign also aimed to drive discourse and make pet adoption a trending topic among target demographics during the campaign period, with a KPI of increasing overall impressions compared to previous campaigns. It generated 164 million overall impressions.

To increase positive earned media coverage of pet adoption in Canada, the campaign aimed to achieve 70% positive sentiment while growing total online news, digital publication, and blog mentions for Humane Canada. The campaign generated 64 million earned impressions, with an estimated value of $840K, and created a positive, feel-good story that resulted in 96% positive coverage

The agency aimed to increase eyes and interactions with Humane Canada’s Instagram account, with a KPI of increasing views, profile visits, interactions, or new followers by at least 30% compared to previous campaigns. As a result of the post, Humane Canada’s Instagram account generated more than 3 million views, 50,803 new followers, 4,803 profile visits and 142K interactions.

Credits

Global President, CEO: Marie-Lise Campeau
President & CCO North America: Johan Vakidis
ECD: David Allard
ACD: Félix-Antoine Brunet
ACD: Alexis Caron-Côté
Art Director: Félix-Antoine Brunet
Copywriter: Alexis Caron-Côté
Designer: Michaël Bonnette
Content Manager: Amélie Duplessis-Tellier
VP, Accounts Services: Thalie Poulin
Account Executive: Gabrielle Crépeau-Hubert
North America Strategy Lead: Shereen Ladha
Strategy Director: Chloe Hutchison
Producer: Alexandra Michaud

Panoply
VP, Media: Nicholas Landry
Strategist: Aliya Varma
Strategist: Bianca Di Loreto

YPR
Account Director, PR & Influencer Marketing: Laetitia Harty

Humane Canada
CEO: Barbara Cartwright
Director, National Engagement: Tara Hellewell
Manager, Marketing Communications: Natalie Hillinger

Toronto Humane Society
CEO: Phil Nichols
Manager, Public Relations: Lucas Solowey

Shoot Studio - Production Company
Producer: Virginie Houde-Briand
Photographer: Gabrielle Lacasse
Retoucher: Jorge Galeano