The Chewy Claus Wish-A-Thon
We re-engineered the telethon for social, turning passive holiday scrolling into a 45-minute high-velocity rescue engine that unlocked $1850 per second.
THE CHALLENGE
At Chewy, pets are family. That belief gave rise to Chewy Claus, a program now in its fourth year of delivering tangible support to shelters. But while Chewy Claus had a history of impact, the landscape had shifted. Every holiday season, millions of pets enter shelters operating at a breaking point, yet on social feeds, charity often feels like homework. Traditional appeals were getting scrolled past in favor of dopamine hits. We realized that for Year 4, the scarcity wasn't awareness; it was participation. To help pets when support is needed most, we needed to stop the doom-scroll and convert passive digital behavior into tangible rescue—without paid media or a safety net.
THE SPARK
Letters to Santa are a 19th-century mechanic. To save lives at 2025 speed, we needed to take the ask out of the mailroom and put it into the livestream. We realized Gen Z doesn't want to consume charity; they want to control it. So we re-engineered the campaign from a multi-step digital program into a live, interactive engine. We traded awareness for agency, giving viewers the power to unlock tangible impact by submitting their pets’ holiday wishes.
The Insight: We stopped treating the audience like donors and started treating them like a community. By turning the donation goal into a rally cry, we proved that internet points can actually save lives if you build the right exchange rate.
THE IDEA
Enter the Chewy Claus Wish-A-Thon. A social-first live-streamed engine designed to unlock mass participation in real time. By inviting audiences to submit holiday wishes for pets, each wish directly triggered donations to shelters in need, turning simple engagement into immediate impact.
Broadcast simultaneously across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, we gamified giving. Instead of a passive broadcast, we facilitated a massive conversation. Live community managers responded to comments and wishes in real-time to hold attention and keep the hype train moving, while the on-screen "Wish-O-Meter" visualized the community's impact second-by-second. We turned every comment and view into a visible unit of progress, making generosity contagious.
THE RESULTS
Breaking the Internet's Speed Limit: The Wish-A-Thon behaved like a viral engine, shattering industry benchmarks.
• We tracked 9,183 wishes in just 45 minutes—that’s a frenzy of nearly 4 wishes every second.
• Attention Hacked: We achieved 14.5% peak concurrent viewership—outperforming the industry standard (2%) by over 7x.
• Cultural Ripple: The audience momentum was so undeniable that it inspired the brand to react in real-time. Chewy doubled its donation commitment live on air, unlocking $5 Million in tangible supplies for shelters.
