Brief:

Get NYC locals, Gen Z, tourists

Who scroll past zoo content without stopping

To actually show up in person

By turning five real animals into characters they already want to follow

The idea:

There’s a baby pygmy hippo named Moo Deng who lives at a zoo in Thailand. She went viral, inspired fan art and merchandise, and doubled the zoo’s visitor numbers without a single paid ad. The zoo did not do anything special. The internet just decided she was a character worth following. We wanted to engineer that for the Bronx Zoo, deliberately, and at scale.

The idea was simple. Give five real animals names, personalities, and voices, then post as them every single day. Romeo the lion who is bold and a little too confident. Ophelia the tiger who is independent and challenges everyone’s assumptions. Bruno the bear who is just genuinely happy to exist. Xavier the giraffe who narrates everything with calm wisdom. And Nadia the gorilla, nurturing, protective, emotionally the smartest one in the group. Real animals, real footage, but with a point of view. A voice. A story that builds over time.

The strategy was to make following the Bronx Zoo feel like following a cast of characters you are invested in, not a wildlife account, not a conservation organization, but something more like a show. Short videos, character monologues, hot takes, interactions between animals. And then, at the end of every piece of content, one quiet pull. Come see what you have been following.