Case Study: The Shelter Pet Project boosts website traffic with Nielsen Holdings

The Brains Behind Better Ads: Optimizing the Cute and Cuddly

The Shelter Pet Project, a nonprofit focused on getting potential adopters to start with shelters, wanted to make its PSA as effective as possible despite a small budget. Nielsen and the Ad Council used consumer neuroscience to study how viewers responded to the ad and identify where it could be improved.

Using EEG and eye-tracking, Nielsen analyzed which scenes held attention and which caused confusion, then helped re-edit the PSA to shorten Jules’s off-screen moments and sharpen the ending. After the update, viewers were more consistently engaged and recalled the ad more clearly; in the first three months after the February launch, traffic to ShelterPetProject.org increased 133 percent, from 74,000 to 174,000 average monthly visitors.

The Shelter Pet Project