Talking Brands: Dumb Ways to Die has plush, games, apparel… What other public safety campaigns could have a life in consumer products?

Spin Master has recently launched a card game based on Dumb Ways to Die, an entertainment brand that started life back in as a railway safety campaign from Metro Trains in Australia.

The original public safety video showcases a number of bean characters each dying in silly ways ­– ‘Set fire to your hair, poke a stick at a grizzly bear’ – all to a catchy tune.

The video ends with a series of train-related deaths, while the song concludes: ‘They may not rhyme but they’re quite possibly the dumbest ways to die.’ If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out below:

Metro Trains expanded the brand into mobile gaming with PlaySide Studios following the success of the campaign and in 2021, PlaySide acquired Dumb Ways to Die outright.

Ben Kelly – GM of Dumb Ways at PlaySide Studios – tells Brands Untapped: “We always held the view that the Dumb Ways to Die brand was one that had serious potential and could be nurtured further.

“We’ve held clear goals for the brand since the acquisition to both reignite nostalgia with an audience familiar with the original viral success of the song, but also to explore new, popular entertainment mediums and platforms.”

Alongside mobile games, Dumb Ways to Die has also expanded into NFTs and even a sleep app called Dumb Ways to Sleep. A partnership with Peaceful Kids, the app features over 100 pieces of calming content, including bedtime stories, relaxing sounds and breathing exercises.

On the product side, the Dumb Ways to Die online store has apparel spanning pyjamas, socks and t-shirts, as well as journals, doodle books and pencil cases. The shop also stocks a range of plush toys based on some of the most popular Dumb Ways to Die characters.

Recently, the brand has enjoyed huge success on TikTok. With 3.2m fans on the official Dumb Way to Die TikTok account, it’s the sixth biggest gaming brand on the platform.

@dumbwaystodie #duet with @PainterFoos see u ladder #dumbways #dwtd ♬ original sound – Blake Floyd

Also helping to put the brand in the spotlight is a recent deal with Spin Master for an official Dumb Ways to Die card game. In the game, each player starts with three lenticular Animated Bean Death Cards, and the last person to have one or more Beans alive is the winner.

Sam Susz – Senior Director of Games at Spin Master – tells us: “The combination of the iconic song layered with the charm and art style of the Bean characters is contagious – it’s what makes Dumb Ways to Die stand out in a distinctive and light-hearted manner.

“Dumb Ways to Die is a huge entertainment brand and top-selling digital game, with content proven to be highly shareable and likable across social media. This gave us the confidence that the IP is ripe for the development of a physical card game.”

The route from public safety campaign to global entertainment brand is not one travelled often. With that in mind, we asked The Ashmolean Museum’s Carrie Hickman, Start Licensing’s Ian Downes and The Gift Association’s Chris Workman for their picks for campaigns that could have a life in licensing…

Carrie Hickman, Publishing & Licensing Co-ordinator, The Ashmolean Museum
When I was invited to consider this question, Dumb Ways to Die was new to me and as soon as I watched the video, I was on board! I immediately showed my children who laughed along and asked whether we could buy the game. Interestingly, they knew the song but not the context… Anyway, an instant hit in my house!

I think what makes the Dumb Ways to Die campaign so successful and attractive to licensing opportunities is the perfect combination of funny, cute – if slightly unfortunate – characters, a catchy tune and bright colours, coupled with the all-important self-safety messaging. So, I began thinking about messaging first. In my experience, storytelling is at the very heart of successful, authentic licensing. In my world, that involves communication, education, inclusion and honesty. The message needs to be meaningful and relatable.

In terms of advertising, I remember my brother, sister and myself being the advertisers’ dream: I’ve lost count of how many slogans, jingles and theme tunes we used to memorise and recite – much to the bemusement of my parents! And my kids now do the same! The adverts that had the most impact on me were not necessarily the jolly, sing-a-long adverts, but the slightly scarier public safety campaigns, such as the Think! adverts featuring motorbike accidents and drink drivers, and the ‘Clunk, Click’ advert of the Eighties and early Nineties. Likewise, the iconic ‘Charlie Says’ films had a huge impact on me as a primary school child.

The challenge, clearly, is to balance the message with the fun, with a story that is meaningful to the intended audience. And what is more urgent and in need of attention than the climate crisis? With perhaps a focus on the smaller more individual acts each of us can contribute.

The Keep Britain Tidy campaign is an oldie but a goodie. It’s simple, immediately recognisable and animateable with a relateable message. The opportunities are not dissimilar to Dumb Ways to Die, with the potential of using different colours to develop and represent different characters or causes. Keep Britain Tidy clearly enjoys some existing partnerships already, but I think has the potential to have a standalone life in licensing.

Ian Downes, Director, Start Licensing
I think this is very much a generational thing – the campaigns we were exposed to growing up or indeed still resonate with us now… I guess in many respects, a public safety campaign has to be well targeted to those it’s seeking to influence.

In the current crop of campaigns, one that I have been involved with saw BRAKE ­– the road safety charity ­– partner with Aardman to use Shaun the Sheep to help highlight Road Safety Week in schools. This campaign certainly has potential in licensing through partnerships and it’s something we would hope to develop in the future, ideally with a retailer or licensees connected to the subject matter in some way.

Sticking with road safety campaigns, as a child of the 1970s I grew up with a character called Tufty who was used to teach us about road safety. I think for a certain generation, Tufty would resonate well with consumers… Product opportunities might be limited, but I could imagine companies like Steiff and ENESCO doing well with limited-edition products.

A challenge with a lot of campaigns like Tufty is the age of consumers who would recognise the campaign and what products you could develop. That said, the Imperial War Museums has developed some great products such as wall art and ceramics using Public Information imagery from World War II. The Government used posters and adverts to get key messages across to the public during wartime and there were some iconic posters produced with catchy strap lines – such as ‘Loose Lips Might Sink Ships’, ‘Keep Mum She’s Not So Dumb’ and ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’.

The artwork associated with these posters lends itself to licensing and to an extent is timeless – although some of the straplines may not be so appropriate in 21st Century Britain! But these posters and campaigns were a product of their era and seemed to be very effective campaigns.

Maybe one opportunity is for some enterprising board game company to bring a range of these campaigns together and house them in a compilation game… It might be fun to get consumers designing some new campaigns for modern Britain as a part of a board game.

And having done a little digging, it’s not entirely new ground – Spear’s put out a Tufty board game back in the day…

Chris Workman, PR & Marketing Manager, The Giftware Association
‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ is the immediate campaign that springs to mind, given its longevity and space for interpretation and personalisation.

It was originally conceived in 1939 as a morale booster after the outbreak of war. What seems like quite bleak beginnings has now seen its usage expand through the entire giftware industry, from notebooks to mugs, from pencil cases to clothing, each with slight amendments to both in wording and style.

The government’s messaging throughout the pandemic seemed to itself be inspired by this original campaign, and we’ve started to see the stay home, stay safe terminology, expand into products. Some have questioned whether government messaging should have a space in the licensing world, but it has always been so. Social history has so frequently informed slogans on merchandise, that the Keep Calm and Carry On style of campaign will always be on trend and in demand.

I’m a Nineties child, so a time when adverts were a bit strange and weird – and probably not censored as they are now. There are hundreds of phrases that live in my head rent free direct from adverts that are still used today… ‘Wassup’, ‘If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club’ and when eating a Jaffa cake – ‘Total eclipse’. These will all revive memories in a certain generation that still use these like me and could be brought into the licensing world.

‘You’ve been Tangoed’ anyone? I can see this maybe having a spot in licensing and will bring back some memories of an orange man messing up someone’s hair. Or perhaps a coke-themed holiday range following their hugely successful ‘Holidays are coming’ campaign. It’s only Christmas once you have seen that advert, right? Surely there are Christmas-themed ranges that can play off this with trains and trucks, Christmas villages and ornaments.