Pets.com hired the San Francisco office of TBWA\Chiat\Day to design its advertising campaign. The firm had recently created the popular Taco Bell chihuahua. For Pets.com, they designed a doglike sock puppet that carried a microphone in its paw. The puppet, performed by Michael Ian Black (an alumnus of MTV's surrealist comedy sketch show "The State"), was a simple sock puppet with button eyes, flailing arms, a watch for a collar, and a stick microphone emblazoned with "pets.com". The sock puppet first appeared in Pets.com's advertising in August 1999.