Monkey’s Triumphant Return for PG Tips

PG Tips draw on their branding legacy and bring back one of their most popular characters with a very up-to-the-minute spin in their new campaign. “At Home With Monkey”, the brand’s first ad with new agency New Commercial Arts, sees a return for PG Tips’ iconic character. Monkey’s been integral to the brand’s advertising since 2007, after his initial stint as ITV Digital’s mascot in the early 00s.

Monkey has only been in retirement for a year, but this return still marks the biggest change to the character since that initial move to PG Tips. He’s now got a new human partner, actress Emily Atack, but this time he and Atack as “Mrs M” are married with two unseen kids.

It’s a major shift for one of the most popular mascots in British advertising, but it allows PG Tips to tell a different kind of story with Monkey while still reaping the brand fluency benefits of having such a recognisable character. The strategy bears fruit right away, with “At Home With Monkey” working as an entertaining satire on the booming genre of celebrity reality TV, where superstars offer viewers a supposedly intimate glimpse into their lives.

The most obvious examples are the Kardashians and the Beckhams, and indeed Monkey’s reality TV spoof has a direct lift from one of the Beckham’s most famous scenes, when he tells Mrs M “be honest” about how much sugar she has in her tea. It’s one of the high points of a script packed with funny moments and lines, which reintroduces the character and establishes Monkey’s new situation while creating plenty of room for appearances and stories to come.

Changing Monkey’s core set-up is a risk for PG Tips but Test Your Ad results show it’s paying off already. The new ad scores an impressive 4.7-Stars on Test Your Ad, predicting a strong potential to drive long-term share gain given the right investment. The hot drink category is a competitive one in the UK, but this is still well above its 3.3-Star average.

The ad also gets an Exceptional short-term Spike Rating, which predicts short-term effects like sales gains. What’s more, it’s very clear from the rest of the results that it’s Monkey’s presence driving a lot of these effects. He’s prominently mentioned in audience comments as a driver of Surprise and Happiness, the two most positive emotions for ad effectiveness. And he’s the most mentioned association with the ad, up with “tea” and the brand name.

So why is “At Home With Monkey” so effective? Using a famous brand mascot to have fun with the conventions of celebrity is a great idea, and the ad really is packed with jokes which will make it entertaining across multiple viewings (as well as easily broken up for short-form use). It’s a brilliant use of a cultural reference, something we know from Orlando Wood’s Lemon is one of the most effective creative elements an ad can employ.

But more than this Monkey’s return is a triumph for creative consistency. It would have been understandable if PG Tips and New Commercial Arts had used the change of agency as an opportunity to come up with an entirely new mascot. Instead they gave Monkey a new context and new persona but the same loveable looks and humorous approach. The reception for this ad proves that refreshing an asset is often a much better plan than retiring one.