Featured Rescue ~ Julius the Bouvier

I've devised a new way to look at petfinder/petango/etc advertisements. It is a scoring system that analyses different aspects of an advertisement. It's important when you are advertising an animal to highlight specific information about it. In fact, a lack of information can actually deter potential adopters. (Let's face it, there are 169,420 dogs out there available for adoption on Petfinder RIGHT NOW so why is the dog you are fostering any better than the next guy? Don't give me the "if they aren't willing to make a phone call then they aren't good adopters" crap ... those aren't the target audience of these ads -- don't EVER forget who your target audience is!) See the bottom of this post for a breakdown of this scoring system.

Today's Featured Rescue is Julius the Bouvier des Flanders (mix). He's approximately 1.5 years old. With a name like Julius, I keep thinking Julius Caesar ... I wondered if that's who he was named

for but couldn't find any info that might suggest this.

This is one of the longest descriptions of an animal I've seen on Petfinder ... it's very informative but it loses points with the organization. The comment about his 110% beauty quotient also lost points (pictures can say a thousand words, no?). I'd like to see the thoughts grouped together in some sort of logical pattern rather than random sentences about the dog. The pictures are great though - and they earn points for that.



Overall, this ad gets 3/3 for pictures, 3/4 for information and 1/3 for organization ... that's a total of 7 out of 10. Not bad but not great.

Pet Advertisement scoring system

10 points

3 for pictures

__________ 1 for more than one picture

__________ 1 for different angles of animal (I don't want to see two identical pictures!)

__________ 1 for good picture quality

4 for information

__________ 1 for information

__________ 1 for quantity

__________ 1 for quality

__________ 1 for no fluffy bunny crap
3 for organization

__________ 1 for easy to read

__________ 1 for grouping your thoughts logically

__________ 1 for the reader being able to pull necessary information out of the ad