Tomba Latas Reframes Animal Abandonment as a Street Crisis in Brazil
Pets Are Not Trash is a 2019 ambient public interest campaign created by Curitiba agency LCT for Brazilian animal-welfare NGO Tomba Latas, designed to reframe street animal homelessness as a direct consequence of deliberate human abandonment rather than an abstract social condition.
The campaign launched in August 2019 in Brazil, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and campaignsoftheworld.com. Its central objective was to shift public perception of why animals end up on the streets — placing responsibility squarely on the act of abandonment itself. By using the ambient medium rather than conventional broadcast or digital formats, LCT chose to meet audiences in the very urban environment where the consequences of abandonment are most visible. The campaign comprises a single media asset, making its communicative economy a deliberate creative choice rather than a production constraint.
Tomba Latas operates as a Curitiba-based animal-protection NGO, not a commercial brand, and this campaign reflects the organisation's core advocacy mission. In Brazil, the scale of the street animal population gives the campaign's premise immediate urgency. According to Instituto Pet Brasil figures reported in February 2020, Brazil's pet population stood at approximately 139 million animals in 2019, and the country simultaneously recorded one of the largest concentrations of street animals in Latin America, according to selfstorming.com. Against that backdrop, Pets Are Not Trash positions abandonment not as an unfortunate accident but as an identifiable, preventable cause of a visible national problem. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100, reflecting solid strategic grounding and contextual relevance within the public interest category.
LCT grounded the Pets Are Not Trash campaign in a single, precise behavioural insight: that most Brazilians do not consciously connect the street animals they pass daily with the individual human decision to abandon a pet. The ambient format was chosen to collapse that cognitive distance, placing the campaign's message at the precise moment and location where audiences encounter the reality it describes. This situational specificity is the campaign's primary strategic asset.
In Brazil, the pet sector generated approximately R$35.4 billion in sales in 2019, up around three percent year-on-year, according to Instituto Pet Brasil figures reported in February 2020 — a figure that underscores just how deeply embedded pet ownership is in Brazilian consumer culture. The tension between a booming pet-ownership market and a persistent street animal crisis is the strategic fault line that Tomba Latas and LCT chose to expose. Where commercial pet brands such as Pedigree and Purina have historically used emotional attachment narratives to drive product sales, Pets Are Not Trash redirects that same emotional register toward accountability rather than consumption.
The campaign also sits within a longer lineage of Tomba Latas creative work. Prior to LCT's involvement, Curitiba agency Candy Shop produced at least two documented campaigns for the NGO: a static-image effort in October 2015 and the outdoor adoption-focused Snapadoption campaign in August 2016, as recorded by adsoftheworld.com. That earlier body of work emphasised adoption incentives and positive companion-animal framing. Pets Are Not Trash shifts the register toward direct confrontation with abandonment behaviour, representing a meaningful strategic evolution in how the organisation chooses to communicate in the Brazilian market.
Creative director Ricardo Tramontini led the Pets Are Not Trash execution alongside art directors André Luiz Graciano and Ricardo Tramontini, with copywriting by Junior Cardoso and Rafael Pavelegini, agency production by Rafaela Tramontini and Stela Biernaski, and client oversight from Tomba Latas representative Carla Moraes, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and campaignsoftheworld.com.
The ambient medium is the creative engine of this campaign. Rather than asking audiences to seek out a message, the work places its statement inside the existing urban furniture of Brazilian street life. The choice of a single media asset reflects a discipline that many ambient campaigns lack — the idea is strong enough to stand without repetition or variation, and the creative team trusted it to do so. This economy of means is consistent with the best traditions of public interest advertising, where resource constraints often sharpen rather than diminish conceptual clarity.
The campaign's visual and conceptual language draws on the uncomfortable juxtaposition of domestic pets — animals defined by their relationship to human care — with the imagery and associations of waste disposal. That juxtaposition is not incidental; it is the argument. By literalising the metaphor of discarding an animal, the creative team forces a confrontation that polite awareness messaging typically avoids. In the context of Brazil's urban environment, where street animals are a normalised sight, this kind of perceptual disruption serves a specific function: it makes the familiar strange again. The execution asks viewers to feel implicated rather than sympathetic, which is a harder and riskier creative position to hold, and one that the single-asset format reinforces rather than dilutes.
No verified performance data for Pets Are Not Trash is publicly available. No quantified results for adoption rates, donation uplift, reach, or impressions have been documented across adsoftheworld.com, campaignsoftheworld.com, or any other publicly accessible source. The campaign did not appear in the award records of major industry programmes including Cannes Lions, the One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the Effies at the time of this analysis.
In the absence of verified metrics, structural effectiveness becomes the appropriate analytical frame. The campaign's greatest measurable quality is its contextual precision. Ambient advertising derives its power from the specificity of the encounter, and in the Brazilian urban context — where street animals are part of the daily visual landscape — the work had a readymade and receptive environment. The decision to concentrate the entire campaign into a single media asset also suggests a confidence in the idea's self-sufficiency, which is a structural indicator of creative conviction rather than budgetary limitation.
For a Curitiba-based NGO without the media spend of a national advertiser, the ambient format represents a high-efficiency strategic choice. It generates encounter value rather than paid impression volume, and in the public interest category, encounter value — the degree to which a message is actually processed rather than merely served — is often a more meaningful measure of effect. The Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100 reflects this balance: the campaign demonstrates real strategic and creative coherence, while the absence of documented reach, results, or industry recognition places a ceiling on its assessed overall impact.
Pets Are Not Trash is a 2019 ambient public interest campaign created by Curitiba agency LCT for Brazilian NGO Tomba Latas. It uses street intervention to argue that animal abandonment — not circumstance — is the primary cause of street animals in Brazil, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and campaignsoftheworld.com.
LCT, a Curitiba-based advertising agency, created the campaign. Creative director Ricardo Tramontini led the project, supported by art directors André Luiz Graciano and Ricardo Tramontini, copywriters Junior Cardoso and Rafael Pavelegini, and producers Rafaela Tramontini and Stela Biernaski, with Carla Moraes representing Tomba Latas, per adsoftheworld.com.
Tomba Latas and LCT chose the ambient medium to place the campaign's message inside the urban environment where street animals are already visible to Brazilians daily. This situational approach collapses the distance between the cause of abandonment and its visible consequence, making the argument immediate rather than abstract.
Brazil recorded one of the largest concentrations of street animals in Latin America, according to selfstorming.com. This exists alongside a domestic pet population of approximately 139 million animals in 2019, per Instituto Pet Brasil figures reported in February 2020, creating the tension the campaign directly targets.
Pets Are Not Trash did not appear in the award records of Cannes Lions, D&AD, the One Show, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the Effies at the time of this analysis. No awards data for the campaign has been found across major international industry award programmes.
Pets Are Not Trash received a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100. The score reflects solid strategic grounding and contextual relevance within the public interest category, balanced against the absence of documented performance data, verified reach figures, or recognised industry awards for the 2019 Brazil campaign.
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