Elanco had done the unthinkable: developed the first treatment for a disease that had previously been deadly in 96% of cases.

The problem? No one cared. Vets trusted existing protocols, dog owners barely knew parvo existed, and the media weren’t interested.

But people were furious about something else: the post-pandemic explosion of dog owners not picking up their dogs’ poop.

And poop spreads parvo.

So we did the slightly audacious thing: we sold a groundbreaking pharmaceutical treatment by talking about dog shit.

We turned parvo’s faeces-based transmission into “Parvo is Poop”, a bold, integrated campaign designed to save puppies by making one simple behaviour impossible to ignore: Clean up poop. Clean up parvo.

We created ParvoTrack, the first-ever disease tracker showing where infected poop had been reported. We partnered with Nextdoor to put hyperlocal parvo alerts directly into neighbourhood conversations. We flooded social with educational content and took the message into clinics, with vets and influencers helping dog owners understand the connection between poop and parvo.