To support shelter pets, Bob Broadfoot and I created the “Meme Machine”, which empowers real shelter pets to make their own social media posts. We followed it up with “Pettable Pins” a Pinterest hack that lets you preview the joy of playing with shelter pets from the comfort of your phone.
Meme Machine
Pets are huge on social media but shockingly, there aren’t any social media platforms designed to be used by pets. We corrected this with the Meme Machine: a room of content creation tools controlled by the behaviors that make shelter pets so lovable in the first place. Images are selected by nudging bouncy balls, emojis are placed with a lick, and hashtags are hashed by rolling around on a giant keyboard.
Amazingly, the posts created by shelter pets consistently beat out bigger brands and real people on organic social engagement. They lapped all car companies combined on #OdometerDay, dunked Krispy Kreme on #NationalDonutDay, and eclipsed NASA on #MoonDay.
The Meme Machine shattered unfortunate stereotypes about shelter pets by proving they’re just as good as any other pet, or person.
Pettable Pins
We hacked Pinterest’s “scrolling videos” ad format to create interactive pins that let people play with shelter pets directly in their feed. Pinterest was so won over by this inventive use of their technology they ran and promoted these ads for free.
