Pooch & Mutt has enlisted the help of four models body-painted as dogs, a top music producer and an award-winning film director to highlight some of the problems with the pet food industry.
While naked models body-painted as dogs might not be the obvious way to talk about pet health and nutrition, Pooch & Mutt believes there is a need to do something different when 87% of the £34 million spent on pet food advertising in the UK is controlled by confectionery giants.
Pooch & Mutt claims there are 3 key factors the public should know about:
- The company’s website provides an infographic to show who owns what.
- Big pet food companies can change what goes in the food, dependent on what is cheapest at the time, without informing customers or even changing the packaging. A link from Pooch & Mutt’s website shows the potential consequences of this for the health of our pets.
- Some pet foods that say ‘chicken’ or ‘beef’ on the front of the packs could contain as little as 1% chicken or beef. There have been other campaigns showing how big companies use the regulations to only include 4%, Pooch & Mutt takes this a step further to show how the worst offenders only use 1%.
Pooch & Mutt founder Guy Blaskey said: “For years the independent pet sector has been making and selling higher quality foods, but have only managed to reach a small percentage of the population. The mass market is dominated by large companies. We think that the nation’s dogs deserve better and we have to think creatively to get this message out there.
“With consumers becoming more aware of pet food ingredients, the growth in sales of our ‘Health food for dogs’ has been astronomical. We thought it was a good time to do something different to get the message across.
“I’m pretty sure everyone can agree that’s what we have done. Both the track and the video came out even better than expected. A huge thanks goes to Ben and Nadia from the production company HOUND London, as well as the music producer Billy, the makeup artists and all the models who did an amazing job on what we knew was a weird brief.”
Each of the models spent over one and a half hours in makeup to get the look right.
The film can be seen at facebook.com/poochandmutt and www.poochandmutt.com/nothingtohide
