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.”