A doge ended up on page 27 of the Guardian after the startup DueDil won the advertising space – and decided it did not need it

Wondering why a hand-drawn picture of a happy shiba inu surrounded by broken English in Comic Sans ended up on page 27 of today's Guardian? The simple answer is advertising.

For those who don't recognise the image, above, it's an example of the doge meme – in this case, a newspaper-themed one, hence captions such as "Brekin newz: cates r ilegal" (breaking news: cats are illegal) and "pls red" (please read).

It ended up in the financial pages of the paper thanks to a business data startup called DueDil, which won a competition run by the Guardian small business network.

"We were surprised that the Guardian would let us do it," explains DueDil's chief executive, Damian Kimmelman.

"We got the £50,000 [of advertising space, the prize in the competition] and we were like: 'Oh crap, how are we going to spend this money?' We debated, and decided on Friday we were going to do something funny. We don't really need the advertising anymore, we get enough traffic as it is."

"I personally thought that doge was hilarious."

DueDil is now offering the next two ad slots to smaller businesses. Despite the fact that the initial advert has no indication at all of who ran it, Kimmelman was confident someone would work it out.

"The internet has a real good way of connecting things. We weren't going to release it, because what's the fun in claiming it? The internet loves a puzzle."