Television advertising can be funny, thought-provoking, emotional or even controversial. But cheesy works, too. So does annoying.
As long as customers remember the company, the ad is effective.
And that is what Liberty Mutual has done with its “Liberty Biberty” mascot -- a “weird yellow fuzzball” according to Connor Harvey, a 19-year-old New Hampshire man who organized a peaceful protest outside the insurance company’s headquarters in Boston on Sunday.
Harvey, under the moniker DimesAreTasty, posted a rant several weeks ago on a YouTube page called Death of Mascots. He called Liberty Biberty “the worst mascot of all time” that has “taken over our screens faster than we can stop it.”
That resulted in a protest that attracted several dozen attendees, UPI reported.
Most of the protesters preferred the other characters in Liberty Mutual’s ads, including the snarky LiMu Emu and his exasperated human partner, Doug (you have to say his name in a low voice to get the full effect). Some even liked Tanner Novlan, the actor who originally flubbed the line about the insurance company, spawning the “Liberty Biberty” phrase.
The new ad campaign was launched in July and developed by Liberty Mutual and its New York creative agency, Bandits & Friends, according to Insurance Journal.
The yellow mascot was created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and was to be “the embodiment of the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you have great coverage at a great price,” according to a Liberty Mutual news release.
The mascot’s roots date to 2019, when Novlan -- who played a doctor on the soap opera “The Bold & the Beautiful” -- portrayed an actor struggling with his lines, Insurance Journal reported.
“Liberty Biberty was already hugely culturally relevant, and we saw this untapped potential as an opportunity for the brand to capitalize on,” Nicholas Bauman, creative director at Bandits & Friends said when the ad launched. “So, we turned a flubbed line into an entity in and of itself, while tying it back to Liberty Mutual. And a fuzzy, yellow manifestation of the feeling of great insurance made perfect sense to us.”
“Liberty Biberty gives us a fresh way to show up in culture while staying true to what makes Liberty Mutual distinctive,” Jenna Lebel, Liberty Mutual’s chief marketing officer, said at the time of the launch, according to Insurance Journal.
Lebel told Advertising Week several weeks later that the company wanted something that was familiar and unexpected.
“The name gives you the familiar,” she said. “The character gives you the unexpected.”
Harvey said he was pleased with the protest.
“Lots of people came out to share their disdain for Liberty Biberty and it looks like a lot of people had fun,” he told Insurance Journal.
Harvey admitted that the protest would not carry any weight with Liberty Mutual.
“(They) probably dumped millions of dollars into creating this horrible abomination and it would look really bad to the investors if they had to cancel the campaign,” he said.
Not everyone at Sunday’s protest opposed the mascot.
Calvin Holmes showed up dressed as Liberty Biberty and held signs promoting the mascot, which prompted jeers from other protesters, according to UPI.
“Someone needs to bear this pain because everyone here is discriminating against this puffball for how he was born, and that’s not OK,” Holmes told the news organization. “We all need to be body positive, and he’s a beautiful freak.”
Liberty Mutual has not commented about the protest.
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