Lyka has partnered with Seven to bring dog health messaging into live AFL coverage, using dog poo as the unlikely centrepiece of a new national campaign.
The fresh dog food brand’s Poo on the Ground campaign launched on Thursday, 2 July, and will run across Seven’s live AFL broadcast for the rest of the home-and-away season.
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Produced in partnership with Seven, with media managed by Alchemy One, the campaign stars AFL personality Billy Brownless. In the spot, Brownless discovers a perfectly formed dog poo on the field before a red labrador runs onto the turf.
The creative is designed to make viewers question whether a dog has made its way onto the field. It uses football language around “performance”, “delivery” and “clean disposal” to connect the stunt back to dog health.
Campaign builds on Lyka’s poo strategy
The AFL work is part of Lyka’s broader Poo Glorious Poo platform, which centres on the role stool quality can play in tracking dog health.
The campaign is underpinned by a peer-reviewed study conducted by the University of Sydney and published in Frontiers. The research compared healthy dogs eating Lyka’s Chicken Bowl with dogs eating dry kibble.
The four-week study used a randomised crossover design with 23 healthy adult dogs across 18 breeds. Each dog received both diets across separate two-week feeding periods, with the dogs fed at home rather than in a controlled kennel environment.
According to Lyka, the study found dogs fed Lyka experienced visibly improved stool quality, greater gut microbiome diversity, steadier blood sugar levels and more favourable appetite-hormone responses compared with dogs fed kibble.
Taking the message into live sport
Cam Luby, Chief Marketing Officer at Lyka, said the brand wanted to use one of Australia’s biggest sporting platforms to make the topic hard to ignore.
“We knew that to get people talking about dog poo, we couldn’t be subtle about it,” Luby said.
“The AFL gives us one of the biggest stages in the country, and Poo on the Ground lets us own a moment that’s impossible to ignore. But the cheek and boldness only works because the science backs it up – better poo is one of the first things owners notice when they switch to Lyka, and now we get to prove it in front of millions.”
Luby said the aim was to create a genuine double take from AFL viewers.
“If we can get spectators to do a double take and genuinely wonder whether a dog poo has made its way onto an AFL field, and spark a conversation in the process, then we’ve achieved our goal,” he said.
Alchemy One backs the AFL placement
Joel Trethowan, Managing Director, Alchemy One, said the AFL audience made the campaign a strong fit for the brand’s message.
“The AFL season delivers some of the most engaged and attentive audiences in Australia,” Trethowan said.
“There aren’t many brands brave enough to build an AFL campaign around dog poo. But that’s exactly why it works. Lyka’s taken one of the country’s biggest sporting stages and given audiences something they won’t see coming, and won’t forget.”
The campaign will also extend to SCA’s Triple M AFL coverage. It will include 30-second in-broadcast spots and branded integrations during the network’s post-match MVP discussions for the rest of the regular season.
Lyka’s AFL campaign will run on Seven until September.
Top image: Billy Brownless in Lyka’s Poo on the Ground campaign