This may be one of the most clever (and high tech!) adoption promotions I’ve ever seen.

Pedigree’s New Zealand branch hired design agency Colenso BBDO to come up with a new way to get the word out on pup adoptions. Using the idea that dog owners tend to look like their pets, Colenso teamed up with NEC to develop Doggelgänger, “Human to canine pairing software, designed to connect real homeless dogs to their human doubles.”

The site uses NEC’s facial recognition technology, normally used for anti-terrorism and border control, to analyze a photo of your face (that you either upload or take with your webcam) and compare your facial features with those from dog photos they have in their database. The software then matches you up with a current stray looking for a home, who happens to look a lot like you. So cool!

I hope this is something that’s ported back to the states. Such a great way to get people into shelters, plus it makes the whole dog search much more personal than sifting through Petfinder pages. Oh and it’s kinda funny to see what dogs you look like. Check out Colenso’s video explaining the project in more detail here.

Both Bruce and I had trouble using the site’s webcam feature, so we took snapshots of ourselves using Photobooth and then uploaded those to Doggelganger for analysis. Below, the mutt Bruce was teamed up with. “That’s a dog I would totally be into,” was Bruce’s reply. Watch out Milo!

Thanks Martina for the tip!

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Doggelgänger”