What your brand can learn from a dog show

We are living through a golden age of faking it: the AI stunt that earns a news cycle and dissolves the moment you press on it, the activation that is shared for five minutes and forgotten, and the commercial that’s more about the celebrity starring in it than the brand. Merriam-Webster named slop the word of 2025. It’s the equivalent of an artificial sweetener; surface-level buzz at best, no substance beneath. So, for the sake of timeline cleansing and inspiration, let’s talk about one of my favorite topics, dogs, the things they do, and dog shows. Every year, several million people watch dogs trot around a ring in televised dog shows. Viewers pick favorites, develop strong opinions about terriers, and text their family 11:00 p.m. about an old English sheepdog named Graeme like something important is at stake. This year was Westminster’s 150th anniversary. I went and what I saw wasn’t really about dogs. It was about what happens when you give people something genuinely worth showing up for. PARTICIPATION IS WHAT MATTERS Human beings are not wired for passive consumption. We are wired for shared experience. Attention is like a rental that depreciates in value the moment the ad spend runs out whereas participation compounds. At the Crufts dog show, the British counterpart to Westminster, presenter Claudia Winkleman could barely get through an interview without stopping mid-sentence to stare adoringly at a golden retriever. The clips of this love gaze spread everywhere. People who had never heard of Crufts shared the clips. Nobody engineered that. They just gave her a microphone, put her near some dogs, and trusted that if the love was real, people would find their way to it. When you give someone a genuine role rather than a passive seat, the thing stops being something they watched and becomes something they were part of. That’s a different relationship entirely. That’s brand love, and it doesn’t show up in a post-campaign r