Brand Mascots = Modern Mythology
Tony the Tiger Matters: CONTEXT COLLAPSE 110!
Alright. Let’s kick off with an obvious-ism: Brand Mascots—the Jolly Green Giants and Ronald McDonaldses of the world—aren’t a popular thing in the ad world these days.
With a few conspicuous exceptions (Flo at Progressive Insurance, looking right at you), contemporary ad campaigns rely on celebrity spokespeople… or, better yet, the products themselves.
Cue George Roberts at Transform:
More brands now lean on celebrities as ambassadors, rather than gunning for mascots; there’s no brand-building necessary when you get George Clooney to front Nespresso or Kevin Bacon to assume the face of EE. Why on earth would a brand risk wheeling out a newly designed, unknown mascot when Jack Black or Lady Gaga is knocking at their door?
That’s a good question!
Especially because brand mascots compose such a huge part of our pop culture shorthand and shared collective unconscious, even in an increasingly post-television world.
A few months ago, the New York Times’ Annabelle Williams wrote an obituary of Museum of Modern Mythology curator Ellen Havre Weis. I have to admit I hadn’t heard of Weis before, which I regretted as soon as I read the obituary:
The museum appeared at first to be a collection of capitalist artifacts. A large figure of the Jolly Green Giant flanked Poppin’ Fresh, of Pillsbury fame, and they shared space with the corpulent Bibendum, better known as the Michelin Man.
But Ms. Weis’s intent was to link our conceptions of these pop-culture figures to the human need to mythologize; she asserted that our Fates, Furies and giants were not left behind in Greece or Egypt, but rather transposed to our own culture. The Jolly Green Giant was her selling point when describing the museum to its leadership and the public — he was, she said, a character straight out of “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
…And, right there, a huge chunk of The Way Advertising Works makes sense.
I mean, it’s a given that successful advertising doesn’t simply rely on clever copywriting or masterful art direction. Those things certainly *help*, but advertising’s central goal—Convincing members of the public to buy or do something—is fundamentally about persuasion. In turn, that takes us into a whole separate realm of psychology and sociology.
Take a look at Wikipedia’s List of American advertising characters, because of course they have one. Tony the Tiger is nearly 70 years old. The Gorton’s Fisherman will be elgible to receive social security in a few years. The Quaker Oats guy is more than a hundred years old.
Successful advertising takes on a life of its own. Part of that is tapping into bigger stories… and when it comes to bigger stories, ad mascots, video games and comic book characters are our three most successful modern ways of tapping into older mythological themes.
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