Funky Pigeon Takes Flight With New Brand Characters

Funky Pigeon

Give a Funk?

4.1

If you’re managing a brand and you want broader appeal and more entertaining ads, one of the smartest things you can do is create an animated brand mascot. From the Meerkats to Kevin The Carrot, animated characters have been front and centre in some of the most effective, long-running campaigns we’ve ever tested. So it’s always a pleasure to see a new brand character, and this week we’re giving a warm System1 welcome to Funky and the Funkettes, an animated band of pigeons adding a touch of soul and song to online gift retailer Funky Pigeon, brought to life by agency VCCP.

Charismatic lead pigeon Funky has all the attributes of a successful character: she’s funny, sassy, full of personality and immediately gives a vivid face to an otherwise anonymous brand. And she’s got a mission – stop people buying bland cards! Funky Pigeon have always had that memorable name going for them, so it makes sense that they’re developing a character to go with it. And for future development of the campaign, there’s her three backup birds – Dexter, Trafalgar and Marvin, whose role here is mostly showing off Funky Pigeon cards and gifts, but who can provide a source of adventure and comedy in later ads.

The opportunity for a long-lasting campaign is what makes brand characters so powerful as a creative idea. At System1 we call them Fluent Devices, and we’ve done plenty of research showing how Fluent Devices work to make campaigns more effective and more likely to generate business impact for a brand.

So why do Fluent Device characters work so well? They kill two birds (not these birds) with one stone – they build a quickly recognisable brand asset at the same time as creating an entertaining framework for individual ads. The brand can build up personalities, stories, and a whole world around the characters. They also appeal to the right side of the brain, creating opportunities to tell stories around a strong central character which gains that “broad-beam attention” that helps effectiveness (see Orlando Wood’s Look Out for the details).

As our latest report shows, planning for long-term campaigns is another extremely smart move for a brand. The Compound Creativity report, launched at Effectiveness Week this year, uses IPA data to explore the major business benefits that consistency brings. Compound Creativity looks at every level of consistency, from long-term brand/agency relationships, through commitment to a creative idea and onto the use of long-term brand assets. Which brings us back to Funky and her friends. Of course it’s early days, but creating a consistent brand character is putting Funky Pigeon on a path to reap the benefits of consistency in future.

Of course, that only helps if people love the new characters! And it looks like they do. Funky’s debut scores 4.1-Stars on the Test Your Ad platform, a strong performance which puts the ad firmly above the gift retailer average (3.2-Stars). Impressively for a new character debut, it also beats the category average on Fluency, with 90%. And it saves its best performance for short-term Spike Rating, with an Exceptional score, predicting a sales boost well above the category average at a time of year when impulse gift purchases are all-important. In other words, the maiden flight of Funky and the Funkettes has been a triumphant success.

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