• by Paul Gough , February 4, 2003

To promote USA Network’s coverage of the nation’s oldest sporting event, the channel is going to the dogs.

The show dogs, that is.

It’s contracted with a Rochester, N.Y., direct marketing firm called K9 Billboards to advertise next week’s programming surrounding The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in Manhattan.

K9’s specialty? Using dogs to tout new products and services for advertisers as varied as ski resorts and Fortune 500 companies like AT&T.

In this case, K9 will station about 100 dogs throughout New York City in high traffic areas Saturday through Monday. They’ll be wearing signs and their handlers, one per dog, will be talking about USA Network’s live Westminster coverage. It’s the 20th year USA has carried the event.

“We have a good crossmix of dogs, all purebred,” said Mark Vinci, founder of K9 Billboards.

K9’s dogs have worked throughout the United States and Canada, promoting cosmetics, TV shows and for such organizations like The Learning Annex and AARP.

Vinci said the dogs generally use one of two advertising vehicles. They can wear durable harnesses that can display embroidered messages or logos in a way that doesn’t hurt them. Or they can wear a backpack that can carry free samples, like key chains or flashlights, which people can pick up while they’re petting the dog.

“For the most part, the dogs kind of just sit there. We’re not walking around the city, asking people to pet our dogs,” Vinci said.

But the dogs just being there causes curiosity, interest and, for advertisers, a high level of viewership.

“It’s unconscious, that we look at animals. A dog or a cat doesn’t have a hidden agenda and they [people] know that a dog is a dog and people can respect that. They aren’t expecting to see an advertisement on a dog,” he said.

Vinci thought of the idea after obtaining a young Akita that he likened to looking like a cute stuffed animal when it was a baby.

“People would literally stop their cars, and then ask to pick up and hold the dog. I noticed the attention the dog got,” he said. Vinci, who has worked in advertising joked that he should put a logo on the dog and then realized it wasn’t a joke: It might even work. A promotion between a local sporting goods store and a ski resort not only worked well for the advertisers but it also sparked a TV news story, which went national and Vinci’s been busy ever since.

K9 Billboards, which recently joined the Outdoor Advertising Association and has only just started advertising, touts advertising on dogs as cost-effective, costing only a couple hundred dollars compared to other media buys. Advertisers get the added benefit of the human handlers communicating in a language potential customers can understand.

“We like to refer to what we do as quality as opposed to quantity,” he said.