HOWL-O-WEEN Pet Costume Contest 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the HOWL-O-WEEN Pet Costume Contest is and who runs it

The HOWL-O-WEEN Pet Costume Contest 2025 is a public-vote photo ballot organized by Wisconsin's Big Cheese 107.9, a radio station licensed to Wausau, Wisconsin. The program invites pet owners to enter costume photos of their animals and lets the public decide the favorites, which places it firmly in the pets vertical rather than the business or sports ballots that dominate community voting in the state.

The ballot is delivered on Second Street, a contest platform that broadcasters across the country use for listener promotions. The station's instance lives at wbcv-fm.secondstreetapp.com, and the 2025 edition of this contest sits at its own dedicated address on that host. The promotion is classified by the platform as UGCVoting/UGCVotingPhoto, meaning entries are user-generated photos and the public vote decides the outcome.

Facts at a glance

Because the organizer is a radio station, the contest doubles as audience engagement for the Wausau listening area. That shape, a seasonal photo vote tied to a holiday, is typical of how broadcast publishers use the Second Street platform, and it means the ballot is promoted on air as well as online during its live window.

The dated record for this Wisconsin pet ballot

Two editions of the HOWL-O-WEEN Pet Costume Contest are confirmed: 2024 and 2025. Both are anchored to October, which fits the Halloween theme built into the program's name. The 2025 edition is the better documented of the pair, with its full window documented from October 17 through October 31, 2025.

The 2025 ballot is closed. Its listing on the Second Street promotions account for Wisconsin's Big Cheese 107.9 carries the closed status, so anyone visiting the 2025 address today sees a finished ballot rather than an active vote. A 2026 edition should follow the pattern set by 2024 and 2025, though the station has not yet posted dates for it.

Several facts about the program are simply not published. The list of ballot categories has not been released for either edition. No rule text covering vote frequency, vote caps or entry eligibility has been released for this contest; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The prize structure for the pet contest is also absent from everything published about it, even though the station's other promotions frequently carry named prize packs.

What a supporter should take from this: the October window is the reliable part of the calendar, everything finer than that is set by the station edition by edition, and the ballot page itself is the authority for whatever the next round announces.

How a supporter votes on this ballot today

The mechanic is a photo vote on the Second Street platform. A supporter opens the ballot page published on wbcv-fm.secondstreetapp.com, browses the pet costume photo entries submitted for the live edition, selects a favorite and casts a vote for it. No purchase, ticket or station membership is part of the design; the promotion exists to let the listening area pick its favorite costume.

Because the 2025 edition closed on October 31, 2025, there is no live voting action to take at the moment. The steps above describe what a supporter does when the next edition opens, which the calendar suggests will arrive in 2026. When it does, the entry photos, the layout and the vote button appear on the same Second Street host the station has used for both confirmed editions.

What the ballot page has never spelled out is frequency. Whether a supporter may return daily, vote repeatedly in a session, or vote once per edition has not been stated in any published rule for this program. That detail decides most vote strategy in public ballots, so it is the thing to read carefully at the top of the live page when the next window opens. If a daily-return rule exists, it will be printed there, and it will shape how supporters plan their repeat visits across the October run.

How this pet ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

Wisconsin has an unusually busy public-vote scene, and the HOWL-O-WEEN Pet Costume Contest occupies a distinct corner of it. Most confirmed Wisconsin ballots in the same corpus of programs are either athlete-of-the-week polls or best-of business readers' choice awards. This program is neither: it is a seasonal pet photo vote run by a single-market radio station.

Compare its neighbours. The Appleton Post-Crescent Cellcom Athlete of the Week is a weekly sports poll from a daily newspaper. The Best of the Valley in Appleton, Best of Madison, the Best of Milwaukee Readers' Choice and the Eau Claire Reader's Choice Awards are all business ballots from print publishers. The Bound Wisconsin Basketball Player of the Week is a seasonal high school sports poll.

What makes this one different is the vertical and the cadence. It is the only pet-focused ballot among the confirmed Wisconsin programs, it runs to a Halloween calendar instead of a weekly or annual business cycle, and its organizer is a music radio station rather than a newspaper. For entrants, that means the competition is costume photos from pet owners across the Wausau area, not businesses or athletes, and the audience is the station's listeners.

Strengthening support for your pet's entry

Support in this ballot is earned through reach, because the vote is a photo ballot open to anyone who visits the page. The practical play for an entrant is direct asks: send your pet's entry link to family, friends, coworkers and local Wausau community groups while the October window is open, and make the ask early rather than in the final days when every entry is pushing.

The station has published no rule about outside help for this contest, so the honest position is that nothing is either permitted or forbidden on the published material. Whatever the rule is, it will appear on the live ballot, and reading it before promoting your entry is the sensible move. Our guide to getting more votes online covers organic outreach tactics that work on photo ballots of this kind, and award vote support is described separately for readers weighing every option.