Who let the dogs out? Not us.

Marketing canine pharmaceuticals has the exact same challenge as marketing human ones. Veterinary clients always want to show dogs just like most traditional clients always want to show shiny happy people. Pleasing the clients while exercising your creativity in different eye-catching ways is what separates the talent from the hacks. Here's how we tried to avoid showing traditional dog shots and pushed for more.

Metacam (canine osteoarthritis) "Liquid Dog" campaign

Metacam (canine osteoarthritis) "Think sm-ALL" campaign

Even when we evolved the campaign and used a real dog, we did a copy twist to make it memorable and not "just stock."

Effitix (flea and tick repellant) "Think sm-ALL" campaign

In this one, we showed the "bugs" instead of the dogs. Somehow they're actually cuter.

Nobivac: Lepto4 (canine leptovirus vaccine) Launch Video

And in this one, we just took 2 little purple dots from the logo branding and made a whole idea out of that.

Intervet Schering-Plough portfolio: Convention Video

And if you don't even have that to work from, just take the brand colors and use every text-treatment video effect you can think of to bring life to connect a portfolio together—even though half the campaigns were inherited and therefore totally different.

But, my absolute favorite deserved it's own writeup, so click here to see how we avoided showing dogs by enlisting puppeteers. The real ones from the Muppets no less: Watch "Even Dogs Get the Flu." Each of the campaigns and videos shown here was the intellectual property of Circa Healthcare licensed to Boehringer Ingelheim, Virbac, and Intervet Schering-Plough respectively.