In 2014, the town of Las Rozas had about 17 000 dogs. What in all likelihood they did not know is that all together, they generated an average 250 grams of droppings, most of which when they were out for a walk with their owners. Or that this amounted to 3.300 kilos of excrements a day, making for nearly 1 ton of dog poop per month. These dogs are almost certainly unaware of the fact that, in addition to tarnishing the town’s image, their poop generates vectors of infectious disease transmission that can affect people (particularly children in playgrounds), cause accidents, and run up a sizeable bill for the town.

It seems that their owners aren’t aware of this either, given the fact that an increase in the amount of canine defecation has been found in the town’s streets and parks, not only generating a health and financial problem but also upsetting the town’s neighbors with this foul habit that had become far more than an inconvenience.

Commissioned by the Las Rozas Department of Health, at Viernes we were aware that the subject matter was delicate and designed a gentle, unaffected awareness-raising campaign to expose the problems posed to health and interaction between neighbors. We set out to produce, creative communication aimed at notoriety to convey the seriousness of the situation yet without pointing fingers or offending. The idea was to convey urbanity and neighborliness. 

This is what led us to be enticed to use the WhatsApp ‘Pile of Poo’ emoji as the campaign icon given that it was an affable, smiling icon, popular at the time.  

For most of us, it’s simply incomprehensible for pet owners to leave their dog’s droppings on the ground without picking them up, That’s why we wanted to use this pile of poo emojis to replace some of the vowels of the main message, making it harder to read and leading to an extra effort in order to understand the message: “Not picking up your dog’s poop is also very hard to understand”. This ironic message was underpinned by the general concept: “Las Rozas is everybody’s, but your dog’s poop isn’t” which could be used over a longer span of time and serve as a reminder in subsequent action.

Our intervention doubled up on the street where we played a role in the town of Las Rozas’ street signs by covering some of the consonants with the Pile of Poo emoji to make them more complicated to read. A small sign beside them conveyed the message that a street full of poo is very hard to understand. 

We took up that very same idea on different supports such as bus shelters throughout the town, shop signs, and municipal offices, educational pastimes at schools, stickers that were put on the sides of cleaning vehicles, thank you patrols, radio spots, social media, banners and, of course, WhatsApp messages. These messages directly involved the Town Council civil servants as well as the entire community of Las Rozas, and, in addition to involving them in the campaign, became an important component of the dissemination and support for the message.

When the campaign period was over, the time came to remove the stickers of the smiling poo from the street signs as a symbol of the campaign’s objective, that is, for dog owners to pick up their dog’s mess from the towns pavements and parks. The intervention met with a very positive response and we hope that the scooping up worked even better.