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March 18, 2011

Critters Make the Brand?

Interesting POV in Advertising Age on the importance of support to establish a mascot for your marketing product or service.
We’d argue that what’s also critter-cal, is to make sure that the mascot is dimensionalized.
Does ‘it’ have a personality?  Catch phrase?  Certain voice?  
We still remember the first time we did a tie-in with a major, long-standing cartoon property.  
The studio’s dossier on every aspect of the cartoon characters was longer than any personnel file HR could fill.
Critters we’ve worked with and created must be true, like a person.  For fictitious characters to be successful, they must live and breathe, animatically speaking.   A Tony the Tiger drawing on Frosted Flakes is far less captivating if one can’t hear and see the growler on TV, radio, and print over time — same as any celebrity in flesh and blood.
As the web keeps booming, there’s even more chance to birth new branded mascots — like we did for a client of ours who’ve bootstrapped a fun, fishy fanatic to leverage in eblasts, online and at trade shows:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEJ4NlgfOGw&feature=player_embedded

Makes Charlie the Tuna look like sashimi, eh?