“Our campaigns deliver more than just a license fee…”: David Born on 10 years of Born Licensing

David, it’s always great to catch up. This year marks Born Licensing’s 10th anniversary – congratulations. If we look back at your aims for the agency when you launched, to what the agency resembles today, how closely aligned are the two ‘visions’?
If I could see then where the business is now, I’d be really proud, excited and happy with the success. The advertising category is very much the wild west of licensing – or it certainly was 10 years ago when I started Born Licensing. There weren’t many licensors doing this and many of the advertising agencies didn’t know the space very well at all – they really struggled. I thought that we could help the ad agencies and raise the profile of licensing in advertising and the benefits of using characters.

I wanted us to become the leader in this back then and we certainly have. We’ve had four of our campaigns recognised at the global Licensing Awards. That’s been great. Looking back over the last 10 years, the quality of work that we’ve done and the hype around the campaigns we’ve worked on has met my expectations in terms of what I wanted to achieve.

What did those early days of the agency look like? Did you hit the ground running?
Well, it actually took a while… I don’t think our first campaign went live for 18 months. The next one went live a year later. It was a slow start and I don’t think I realised how challenging it would be to get started. I remember the launch of the MoneySuperMarket campaign with Skeletor and He-Man dancing to Dirty Dancing – that was the moment when I saw the real power of what I was doing.

In what sense?
Up until that point, I was having to pound the pavements and kick down ad agency’s doors to convince them that working with characters was a powerful strategy that would be beneficial. Once that campaign went live, everyone accepted my meeting requests! Ad agencies were desperate to talk to me about this campaign because it was so successful… The campaign became my elevator pitch. I’d mention that to people in licensing or advertising and they’d grasp exactly what we do.

Since then we’ve had a number of high profile campaigns… The Direct Line campaign with Robocop, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Bumblebee – that was really successful. We had the Buddy the Elf campaign with Asda which won Christmas in 2022. There’s been a lot of others along the way.

What were some of the misconceptions that ad agencies had about using characters back when you were starting out?
One of the biggest challenges was that they didn’t have the relationships. If they wanted to work with a character, they didn’t know who to speak with or they’d get passed around a licensor… And ad agencies need to work quickly. In the last 24 hours, we’ve had seven agencies come to us with briefs – and they need quick answers on feasibilities. They need to be able to move onto another idea quick if something isn’t feasible, so they need quick answers and immediate guidance. If it’s going to take three or four weeks to find the right person at a licensor to speak with, the idea is likely already gone.

So relationships was the big one, but ad agencies also didn’t understand the fundamentals of how it all works in terms of how licensing deals are structured or what parameters they need to work with. The amount of times an agency has said to us: “If we get the licence, can we do whatever we want with the character?” They didn’t understand how much work is involved and what the process is… That’s still the case with some agencies today, but we’ve done a good job in helping agencies grasp the benefits of licensed characters, as well as how much time and budget they need to be allocating to licensing.

“Any character can be placed in an unusual setting, but they need to react to that setting in an authentic way.”

I wanted to dive into the benefits of using characters above using real celebrities. Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen plenty of celebrities get called out for bad behaviour, or ‘cancelled’. Has this aligned neatly with the argument to embrace characters instead?
Yes. We’re always comparing characters to celebrities and always encouraging ad agencies to consider characters more. We did a study a few years ago called ‘A Case for Characters’ that reviewed thousands of ads and calculated how many included a character and how many included a celebrity. We found that fictional characters only appeared in 1.1% of UK advertising, compared to celebrities, sports stars and musicians who collectively appeared in 14.5% of UK advertising. It’s still the same today.

We’re trying to educate the ad industry about the power of characters and how they can be more powerful than celebrities when used in the right way. They don’t come with any of the risk associated with celebrities. You don’t need to worry about characters showing up to a shoot late, or having unreasonable demands, or dying unexpectedly, or getting caught doing cocaine, or cheating on their spouse, or drink driving, or posting something controversial on Twitter… Characters aren’t going to do any of those things! With celebrities, you never know… Characters are easier to work with and you know what you’re buying.

Great point. Now, what do you see as being key to successful creative collaborations between ad agencies and licensors?
It needs to be truly authentic. We see a lot of draft scripts that feature a character doing something that’s not natural to them. They never go down well with a licensor and when they reject that, it actually does the advertiser a favour, because the advertiser doesn’t want a campaign that’ll annoy fans.

Any character can be placed in an unusual setting, but they need to react to that setting in an authentic way. We’ve seen Skeletor and He-Man dance to Dirty Dancing! That sounds like it would be unnatural for those characters, but there were things we added to the script to make it feel authentic. We’ve seen Robocop come to the rescue for an office that has had belongings stolen from it. The idea of him doing that feels unusual, but again, the way we did the script made it feel authentic to the character. When we get a script, we ask: Where is the character? How are they behaving? Does it feel authentic?

Great examples. Diving into the Skeletor and He-Man MoneySuperMarket ad for a moment… How did that one come about?
Well, everyone remembers Skeletor and He-Man dancing to Dirty Dancing, but what people don’t remember is a campaign that launched six months prior to that… It focused on Skeletor dancing down a British street to Fame and ended with He-Man saying: “Skeletor, you’re so MoneySuperMarket!” That was an amazing production that was really well received. It gave everyone involved the confidence that the Dirty Dancing ad would be a high level production.

What was interesting with this one is that we had Mattel involved – as Masters of the Universe is their IP – but we also had Lionsgate involved for Dirty Dancing. So two licenses needed to be signed and two licensors needed to approve all of the material. There were elements in the original script that had to change… A lot of that was about ensuring characters behaved authentically.

For example, one moment in the ad sees He-Man spin Skeletor around. In order to demonstrate He-Man’s strength, you see him spin Skeletor into the bathroom wall. That wasn’t in the original script. It was something Mattel asked for to remind audiences of He-Man’s strength and it turned out to be a memorable moment in the ad.

Did you have a sense it was going to resonate in the striking way that it did?
The Fame ad was very successful and people were talking about it in the ad industry, but the Dirty Dancing one truly went viral. I remember being at a friend’s house for dinner when it went live and I did my tradition of taking a photo of myself in front of the TV during the ad’s debut. Then I went back to dinner and didn’t think about it. Then I got a message from the agency saying: ‘Have a look at Twitter!’ There were three trending hashtags about the ad. The next day we discovered that MoneySuperMarket – in terms of mentions on Twitter – went from 100 mentions a day to 36,000 mentions an hour.

Wow.
It completely blew up. The thing that made me realise the virality of it was that my partner’s mum – who lives in Brazil – sent me a message saying: ‘Have you seen this?’ and it was the ad. She didn’t know I worked on it and MoneySuperMarket only has a presence in the UK… It was a UK only ad and it had somehow made it to my mother-in-law in Brazil. It turns out that it made it onto Brazilian news, so that’s how she knew about it. All in all, it had around 26 million views in the first 24 hours. It was crazy.

And then I imagine the next question is ‘What’s next?’…
Yes, and we then did the amazing Action Man campaign, where he dances to CeCe Peniston’s Finally.

Fantastic. And who was the ad agency for those?
Mother London.

Great work. And what sectors tend to work best for these kinds of ads?
Boring brands in boring categories… Things like financial services… Insurance. Those areas have to come up with very creative advertising because it’s a very competitive space and the product is boring. No-one wants to think about buying insurance!

We want to see more advertisers do fresh campaigns with characters – and embrace campaigns that can build over a three, four, five-year period. That said, the world changes so quickly these days and brands change advertising agencies, so it can sometimes be a challenge to keep an advertising theme going for multiple years. But using a character in a campaign over a longer period will always be more successful than a quick in-and-out campaign.

You mention ad agencies needing to work fast. How long do these projects usually take, from script to airing?
There’s a lot of variables. It depends on the licensor and how quickly they work. Some work fast and some are notoriously slow – and the same is true on the licensee side with advertisers. Some have very long processes and a long list of stakeholders. It also depends on the scope of the campaign. Will it have a 60 or 90 second hero spot with a lot of other material? Or will it be a 30 second spot? Or maybe there’s no moving media? We’re working on a campaign in New Zealand at the moment that’s just billboards. That will be a lot faster to execute.

With the big campaigns, six months can be tough… 12 months is good! Again, it all depends. With our Buddy the Elf campaign with Asda, we started that conversation in the March and the campaign launched in the November.

I wanted to also dig into your process. How much is your creativity fuelled by specific briefs? Or are you always generally thinking of how certain brands could benefit certain campaigns?
The more of our work the advertising industry sees, the more they trust us enough to bring us into the process at a very early stage. They’ll come to us with a brief, the type of character they’re looking for and an early script featuring that character. Then they’ll say: “But, if we can find a similar character, that would be great.” They’ll give us their budget, their timing and we’ll get to know their creative team. We’ll work with them on the best idea – and the most feasible idea.

The Direct Line is a great example of that. The first script we saw didn’t mention Robocop, the Turtles or Transformers. They were interested in other characters that just weren’t feasible from a creative standpoint or from a budget standpoint. We took their brief and then presented them with around 150 characters that we felt we suitable.

Wow! 150.
Yeah! That list really helped us crystallise what they were looking for, and then we thinned that list down to a top 50. Then we reduced it down to the top 10 and that’s when we went and had conversations with the licensors to gauge feasibility. The three that fell perfectly into place were Donatello, Bumblebee and Robocop. That’s typical of our process with agencies. Our goal is to always keep the creative intact, even if we have to change what they originally had in mind character-wise.

Has the advertising industry changed over the last 10 years in any ways that have impacted Born Licensing?
It used to all be about the big TV ad, whereas now, with digital advertising, there’s a lot more content needed. They’ll still want the TV ad, but they’ll also want 25 social media videos or 10 five second YouTube ads. Sometimes we’ll sign a license and instead of 30 to 40 pieces of material, we’re now seeing 100 or 200 pieces on content. One discussion we’re in at the moment looks like it might involve 1000 pieces of material… That is indicative of the amount of content companies feel they need in order to hit every consumer where they are – on social, online, on TV, on radio, in-store, in print, via newsletters… It makes for a lot more work than it used to.

David this has been great. Before we wrap up… We’ve spoken about some of the big campaigns you’ve worked on since Born launched. Is there a somewhat underrated campaign – or one that people maybe won’t be as familiar with – that still holds a special place in your portfolio?
There’s a few… One was our first Super Bowl campaign. That was for Facebook and it used thematic elements from Rocky. It had Sylvester Stallone on the Rocky stairs – that was really exciting for us because we’d never done a Super Bowl ad before.

Another that comes to mind is a British Airways campaign we did with Winnie the Pooh. Working with such an iconic brand was really great to be involved with, particularly for their special centenary campaign.

One other I’d love to mention is a US one – more and more of our business comes from North America these days. It was with GEICO and Angry Birds. What was interesting with this is that the Angry Birds team saw a spike in downloads for the game while the campaign was out. We’re very focused on delivering incremental revenue to the licensors we work with – and the licensing industry as a whole – but we do realise that our campaigns deliver more than just a license fee… They deliver a halo effect for brands that have a lot of indirect revenue associated with them.

Rovio enjoyed a spike in downloads during that campaign and that would’ve had indirect revenue benefits for them as well. The same goes for our Skeletor and He-Man campaign – retailers were putting out more Masters of the Universe product than they usually would. When our Action Man campaign launched, there was a spike in sales of Action Man action figures. There are lots of benefits like this for licensors that lend their IP to advertising campaigns.

Great point to end on. Thanks again David. And congrats again on 10 years of Born Licensing.