Yellow Furball Mascot Liberty Biberty Sparks ‘Beautiful’ Protest. Seriously?

Last Sunday afternoon, a social media driven “protest” against Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.’s fuzzy yellow mascot Liberty Biberty drew several dozen people to the company’s downtown Boston headquarters, according to the Boston Globe.

“This is a revolution, this is the next Boston Tea Party,” proclaimed the organizer of the event, Connor Harvey, a New Hampshire resident who a few weeks earlier had posted a rant against the “weird yellow furball” Biberty on a YouTube page called Death of Mascots under the name DimesAreTasty.

In his rant that attracted 13,200 views, Harvey called Biberty “the worst mascot of all time” that has “taken over our screens faster than we can stop it.” The new Liberty Mutual ads have appeared on social media and across television including on high-profile sports programs.

A few weeks later, Harvey followed up with the invitation to the Sunday “protest” to urge the insurer to pull the ads:

“Join us on Sunday, October 25th at 2PM, outside of Liberty Mutual’s global headquarters, where we will protest against Liberty Biberty, the companies’ new disgusting mascot that has plagued our world for the last few months. He is awful and unacceptable, and the people need to make their voices heard.”

The announcement of the event garnered more than 600,00 views. Harvey streamed his event live and, as promised, it was peaceful.

“I guess people had to do something on a nice autumn day and there was no Patriots game. But this reaction is an advertising person’s dream,” one Boston Globe reader posted about the Sunday protest.

Pro and Con

Harvey’s online rant against Liberty Biberty has attracted more than 850 comments, pro and con.

“Liberty Mutual is that one friend who says a joke that gets laughs once and then never stops making the exact same joke even when people start groaning at it,” stated one.

“I thought he was a pineapple,” quipped another.

“I would buy their insurance if they burned it in a commercial,” promised another.

Some comments are positive.

“I actually like Limu Emu and Doug, but I’m completely on board with Liberty,” offered one.

“I actually like what Liberty Biberty represents artistically as a practical puppet crafted by the Jim Henson Creature Shop instead of a CGI monstrosity like a lot of companies are doing now. It’s the opposite of slop,” proclaimed another.

Still others expressed mixed feelings.

“I’m one of the like only people that liked Limu Emu (and Doug), so to see the ad entirely dedicated to replacing Doug and only Doug felt bad,” confessed one.

Many used the opportunity as an invitation to discuss other favorite and not-so-favorite mascots, from Cap’n Crunch to Jake from State Farm and Two Guys in Sonic and Jiffy Lube ads to GEICO’s gecko.

Comedian John Oliver has also taken to complaining about the new mascot, urging viewers of his HBO Max show Last Week Tonight to post sexualized images of Liberty Biberty on social media to bring about an end to the campaign.

Liberty Biberty’s Beginning

The new ad campaign that launched in July was developed by Liberty Mutual and its New York creative agency Bandits & Friends. The puppet mascot was crafted by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to be in the words of the insurer’s press release “the embodiment of the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you have great coverage at a great price.”

Liberty Mutual, Bandits & Friends, and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop have not replied to requests for comment. But the insurer and ad agency explained their thinking at the launch of the campaign in July.

The Liberty Biberty character’s roots date back to a 2019 ad in which an actor struggling to pronounce the company name calls it Liberty Biberty, which the insurer says has become a very popular phrase. The new mascot reflects the decision to try to turn the familiarity with that gaffe into a brand asset and lovable mascot.

“Liberty Biberty was already hugely culturally relevant, and we saw this untapped potential as an opportunity for the brand to capitalize on,” said Nicholas Bauman, creative director at Bandits & Friends. “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,” said Jenna Lebel, Liberty Mutual chief marketing officer.

In an interview with Advertising Week just weeks after the launch, Lebel said her team considered “a number of concepts, well over a hundred ads,” before they chose this approach with the fuzzy yellow puppet. “But once we committed to building on the ‘Liberty Biberty’ phrase itself, the character almost had to be something other than a literal person or animal.”

She said they wanted something that felt both familiar and unexpected. “The name gives you the familiar. The character gives you the unexpected,” she said.

She called the early response “really encouraging” and said the level of early press and social conversation was exceeding expectations. “We’re already seeing strong brand association and likeability in early consumer research. People notice him, and they connect him to Liberty Mutual quickly, which is exactly what you want from a new character in his first weeks,” she told Advertising Week.

The campaign was designed to complement existing character-led creative, like LiMu Emu & Doug, rather than replace it.

‘Beautiful Thing’

Reached the day after his Boston “revolution,” Harvey said he is pleased with how his Sunday played out. “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.

As for whether it will have any effect on Liberty Mutual, he said he hopes it does but realizes the company “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.”

However, he added, “at the end of the day people have a genuine disgust for the mascot, and the longer they keep him around the more people will hate the company and not use their insurance.”

The best part of the event for him was “just getting people out of their houses and off their phones to come together…” He said he had multiple people tell him that it was their first protest. That, he said, is “a beautiful thing.”