It’s that time of year again. Time for Super Bowl ads. The estimated cost for a 30 second spot this year is $4-4.5 million. That does not include the cost to make the ad. Obviously when you sink that kind of money into something, you want to get bang for your buck. Hoping to capitalize on the pre-event hype, advertisers have started releasing their ads online the week before the big event.
Advertising Fumble
Have you heard the stink about the GoDaddy ad? The company pulled it after a massive online backlash. The ad featured an adorable Golden Retriever puppy who gets lost and finds his way home only to discover that he has been sold on a website built by GoDaddy. (Get it? GoDaddy is a website company.) If you haven’t seen the ad you can go here to view it.
Viewers were outraged over the ad. Petitions were started and signed. It seems the outrage was because the puppy was sold from a website. (Of course if you look around the web, most rescues and breeders have websites which feature available dogs. It is not that unusual.)
Not a word was said about the first 10 seconds of the ad, which is where they lost me. The ad starts with three puppies in the back of the bed of a pick-up truck. The truck hits a bump and the puppy is ejected. He ends up smashed on the road. Lucky for him he lands in one piece to begin his journey back to the mean breeder who ends up selling him online.
The Lucy Pet Foundation
Then there is the Lucy Pet Foundation ad that is set to air during the annual Kitten Bowl on the Hallmark Channel. This ad has also been generating a lot of buzz.
The Lucy Pet Foundation is a tax-exempt foundation that has as their mission: to reduce pet overpopulation by having mobile spay/neuter clinics across the country and to support causes that benefit animal welfare. A commendable mission.
The ad features cats and dogs playing football except before they complete a play, they disappear. The audience of dogs also disappear to illustrate the animals that are euthanized each year. The final frames are the website address with the request to visit the site and donate. You can see the ad on their site here.
It is a slick and stylish ad with computer generated images. Really impressive for a start-up tax-exempt organization. I saw an article that the ad would have cost a million dollars to make but that almost 90 percent of the cost was donated by Sam Nicholson, the special effects guy who made the ad. OK so it cost approximately $100,000 for the ad plus the cost for it to air on the Hallmark Channel. I am sure the cost for 30 seconds of airtime on Hallmark is not $4 million as it is for the actual Super Bowl, but it has to cost something. I was curious about the foundation’s income and expenses.
I decided to do a bit of looking around.
I pulled the Form 990’s for The Lucy Pet Foundation from 2012 and 2013, (2014 is not available yet). 990’s are the forms tax exempt organizations submit to the IRS each year to report income and expenses.
In 2012 they had $200,000 of income. 2012 seems to be the first year they started to operate. The expenses that year were $93,999 for “various event appearances in the planning stages, including a Halloween Gala & sponsoring a float in the Tournament of Roses Parade…”. Of that $93,999 they spent $62,400 on event expenses, $3,300 on the float and a mere $2,438 on veterinary supplies and expenses. You can view the document here.
I don’t know but that doesn’t seem great to me. The foundation spent less than $2,500 on actual vet expenses. But then again it is trying to start-up and maybe 2013 would be better?
In 2013 they had $507,197 in income. Enough to pay a salaries and compensation of $55,511. In 2013 they spent $107,512 on the float, $30,002 for event expenses and 26,768 for travel. There were of course other expenses as you may expect: legal, printing, insurance, and advertising of $14, 490 for a grand total of $287,322 in expenses.
How much for veterinary supplies and expenses? $26,540. Not even 10% of the expenses went to vet care. You can view the 2013 990 here.
The amounts spent on vet care are disappointing to me. I don’t know about you, but I would like to see a lot more money going toward actual vet care and not fundraising or events. I tried to see how many animals they actually treated for that money, but I could not find hard numbers anywhere on their site. I did look over the 2014 calendar and they had quite a few no cost or low cost spay/neuter and vaccine clinics scheduled so hopefully the 990 will show improvement.
Bedding Down
Now for something less serious and not Super Bowl related. When we were at the cabin last weekend, hubby found an area out back where all the deer must have been bedding down at night.
This is the Thursday Barks and Bytes Blog Hop hosted by Heart Like A Dog and 2 Brown Dawgs.
Hi Y’all!
Whew! My Human found me on my breeders website. She didn’t want a puppy and there I was! I think I got a good home. The animal shelters have websites, at least some of them, and others have FB pages.
As for vet charges, over the years my Humans have used several small, single vet practices, that donate their time to spay and neuter and give shots to shelter animals. Donated vet services will greatly reduce vet costs unless there is a seriously injured or sick animal. It might account for the low cost of vet care.
Y’all come on by,
Hawk aka BrownDog
True I thought about donated services but still as a percentage of the whole it still seems small to me.
Oh a deer bedding area….must be some major good sniffing there. Have a tremendous Thursday.
Best wishes Molly
Molly, you would have been in doggie heaven. 🙂
wow… It makes me sad to read what really happened with that money…. And I’m sad for this go-daddy commercial, I think if I would see someone who transports puppies that way, I probably would kick that guy…
If Easy would find such “deer-beds” he probably would turn into a back hoe immediately :o)
LOL I bet Easy would love our forest!
I’m with you on that GoDaddy ad…they lost me in those first frames! I understand their complaints about the website and it’s relationship to puppy mills, but legitimate breeders use websites too, although I don’t think any of them sell and ship sight unseen as portrayed in the ad. Whatever – any PR is good PR is what I think GoDaddy’s marketing agency said to them. They certainly made a name for themselves and overshadowed Budweiser’s puppy commercials.
You are probably right, they got the attention they hoped to get.
While I agree with Hawk that the vet care could be donated, as a former nonprofit professional, I know for a fact that Admin Costs (including expenses for fundraising, advertising, salaries, travel, etc) should be LESS than 20% of the entire organization budget. That is a Best Practice and proves that the money donated by individuals, corporations and foundations are going toward the Mission, in this case the animals that need care. It would seem that the numbers you have found (and I believe are correct since they came from the 990) prove otherwise for this organization. That is very sad.
Gina and Oz
Thank you for that clarification Oz. In the future I am going to use your formula to decide whether I donate to a particular organization or not.
Everyone should use that Best Practice to gauge whether they will donate to an organization or not. It’s one of the criteria Charity Navigator uses to rate nonprofit organizations for their website.
I love how you don’t take things at face value (which I am prone to do), but research things to find the real stories.
I agree with you on the GoDaddy ad….I was already disgusted when the puppy fell out of the pickup truck….never mind the rest of that commercial. I just thought it was stupid. But it still got them way more attention than they deserved.
I suppose the numbers you turned up are common in larger non-profit organizations. But I also think that the only way to get the public’s attention these days is to spend a whole lot of money being splashy…..and at least the money Lucy Pet Foundation spent was for the greater good….not just to make money for a corporation. I feel like they are not just looking for donations, but to get word out there about all the pets being euthanized (though again maybe I’m being naive). There’s still a lot more buzz out there about the Budweiser commercial now (from what I’ve seen) with the general media than there is for Lucy Pet. And what’s their message? Oh yeah, drink more beer, preferably Budweiser. And they’re not stupid using cute puppies and horses to do so. 🙂
Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue if all they ever want to do is to make commercials and get the word out, but then they also need to change their mission statement and say that is what they want to do.
I’m so glad Oz weighed in. Thank you! Enlightening. And I agree that the very beginning of the puppy commercial was disturbing. Seeing the puppies unsecured in the back of a pick up was enough to make me angry right from the start. Buying puppies online is whatever, but this was just an irresponsible ad. And they knew it when they made it. I didn’t involve myself in the broo haha, knowing that Go Daddy doesn’t deserve my time and attention. They’ve proven that year after year with their commercials.
I agree. That is why I linked to the ad rather than posting it. But then I thought well by just ignoring the way they presented breeders also feeds their agenda.
Bravo for your investigative work on The Lucy Pet Foundation. I think it is always a good idea to check out a company to find out how they spend their money before donating to them.
Thank you. I do it for any cause where I am thinking of making a donation. I usually come to the conclusion that my local shelter could use my money more.
Thanks for doing some research for us on the Lucy Pet Foundation. I agree, it’s always best to investigate a little bit before supporting an organization because you want your donation to have a positive impact and really make a difference, and you’re right, sometimes local shelters and organizations can use the donation more effectively.
I just know hard hard they struggle to cover their costs and usually it is no frills.
I hated that GoDaddy commercial for many reasons, not the least are the ones you’ve mentioned. As for the Lucy Foundation thank you for that. I was asked to highlight their Super Bowl campaign but I had some concerns and requested some information to help clarify. As of this comment, I haven’t received any answers. I wonder if the vets performing these low cost spay/neuters is included in the salary portion of their financial statements?
I wondered if it was a vet salary too Jodi. Seems a lot for the number of clinics they held that year. I imagine they have to have some sort of administrator so that may be it but it or a combo. I have to say that I had to dig to find those 990’s. I like organizations that include them on their site.
Thanks for the heads up..very sad indeed to hear where that money is being spent.
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I was not thrilled about any part of that GoDaddy add. I agree that the pup could of been killed falling out of the truck. It was just a really bad ad! I don’t know what they were thinking when they were putting it together. As for the Lucy foundation, I also agree that it’s extremely disappointing! How many more animals could be spayed/neutered if they weren’t spending that money on events! That’s so crazy. 🙁
Also since they use the mobile vans they are limited from what I have seen in their flyers. There is an age limit (under 5), the pet cannot be overweight, and there is a length of body limit. I just wonder if giving a voucher would not get more results.
I found my Pixel online. Adopted her sight unseen. Because she was on a terrible, evil website. Because good rescue groups and breeders should only make people aware of available animals through psychic vibrations. Bleh.
I am learning that many animal organizations, the Humane Society of the United States among them, spend less helping shelter animals directly and more on lobbying. That’s not terrible, of course, as long as the organization makes that very clear at the outset. Which the HSUS and others do not.
Psychic vibrations….I like that. Pixel won the lottery when you found her on that site.
Do not get me started on HSUS…
I won the lottery when I found her. I can’t imagine a more wonderful cat.
Great job doing the research on Lucy Pet’s financials. You answered some questions that naturally came to mind when learning about their campaign. I would echo what others have said that at least it is for a good cause, and also that we know that operational costs can sometimes absorb funds in ways that detract from a main service when you have marketing and other business expenses to incorporate. It would of course be better if more of the revenue could go towards the main service being offered. *wags* – Gilligan from WagsAhoy.com
As I said, hopefully they will improve in the future. 🙂
Yes.
Oh no! This was very interesting to hear!
ღ husky hugz ღ frum our pack at Love is being owned by a husky!
Thanks!
Personally, I think that the cost of a 30-second ad ($4-4.5mil) is absolutely ridiculous, whether it’s being shown during the Super Bowl or during an old rerun episode of “Bewitched”! Meanwhile — well, I’ll get off my soapbox before I start.
PS. I haven’t seen the GoDaddy ad you’re talking about. I hope I don’t ever see it. Usually I walk away from the muted TV while the commercials are on.
Since it was the most watched ever with 1/2 of the tvs in the US watching, I guess the advertisers got some bang for their buck. I watch for the game not the commercials. 🙂
Thank you for your research. Eye opening for sure. I have heard from other techs that have happened to work at low cost clinics that the cost are can be low because they don’t use monitors, don’t have techs in the rooms to monitor have only the surgeon in the room doing the surgery and the techs are getting the next one ready which isn’t much using low cost anesthetics shaving and performing the surgery. No IV fluids, No pre anesthetic bloodwork ect. just the bare bones, no pain relief either. So it seems yes the person goes their because of the low cost but their pet really isn’t getting the best care that can be given. So if more money was put into the best care for the animal and still keeping it low cost for the client then I feel that would be money well spent vs so much on floats ect.
They do claim to give pain meds, but I think you are correct about the rest. They have length of dog limits, age and weight restrictions so it seems to be very bare bones. I am not sure the vans are best idea. I would think giving a voucher for the procedure to be done at a clinic would be a better option.