What’s yellow, fluffy and has a name that’s likely to get stuck in your head? The insurance sector’s newest TV star.
Liberty Mutual worked its way into consumers’ brains over the past decade with a series of ads that feature a hard-to-forget slogan (Just repeat the first name of the company several times in sing-song fashion) along with a bizarre cast of characters that includes a “Limu Emu” and a guy named Doug. Starting this week, Liberty adds to the coterie, with “Liberty Biberty,” a fuzzy anthropomorphic character meant to symbolize the feeling a consumer gets when they nab insurance at a fair price.
The character may look odd, but the strategy behind it is anything but.
The expression “Liberty Biberty” has been featured in the insurance company’s campaigns since 2019, when one ad character known as “Bad Actor” uttered it as he tried to audition for a spot in the campaign. Now, says Jenna Lebel, chief marketing officer for U.S. retail market at Liberty, the saying a well-known piece of intellectual property the company can deploy smartly.
“That phrase has just taken on a life of its own. It caught on quickly. People repeated it. They even call our company ‘Liberty Biberty’ sometimes,” she says. “I think brands can spend years and millions of dollars to try to build something like that — and we already have it. So rather than ignore it, we kind of leaned into it and that gave us an opportunity.”
Add the creature to the swelling ranks of characters deployed in commercials to help insurance companies stand apart from one another. Over the decades, the average consumer has likely encountered Jake From State Farm; Progressive’s Flo and her colleagues Jamie and Mara, not to mention Dr. Rick; Allstate’s Mayhem; Geico’s Gecko; Farmers Insurance’s Professor Burke; and, of course, the famous Aflac Duck.
Despite the seeming ubiquity of its advertising, Liberty is not the sector’s biggest backer of ads. The company is outspent widely by competitors such as State Farm, Geico, Allstate and Progressive, according to 2025 data from Dowling & Partners, a research firm that focuses on the insurance sector.
Finding the right fictional character to talk up insurance has become key. “Unfortunately, as an insurance company, we don’t have a tangible product, and so I think that’s why you see the entire category rely on brand cues or brand devices like brand characters to really establish that linkage,” says Lebel. “Consumers, when they’re shopping for insurance, they’re shopping only a few brands, and it’s always the first few brands that come to mind. And so top-of-mind awareness or unawareness is hugely important in this category.”
The characters are quirky, and, over many years, become part of a larger story as audiences learn more about them. At some point, however, even a favorite guest risks becoming unwelcome. That’s why many of the insurance companies keep adding to their roster of oddball personalities. Many of the companies may also fear the inevitable stage when consumers start to ignore ads because they’ve seen the same ones, or seen ones with the same themes, multiple times. That dynamic has played a bigger role in marketers’ decisions since the advent of the large streaming services, which often show fewer commercials overall, but can send the same ones to particular subscribers multiple times during a viewing experience.
To stand out, Liberty Mutual tapped Jim Henson Creature Shop and puppeteer Grant Baciocco, who gives the new character its voice. “Puppets just bring so much joy and entertainment,” says Lebel, and the Henson people “are the experts in that area.” In weeks to come, sports fans may come across the new campaign not only in commercials but also integrations during NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” and ESPN’s “Sports Center,”says Lebel. “We are still exploring” additional partnerships, she adds.
The yellow creature was just one of the concepts Liberty Mutual considered. The company looked at dozens of different concepts, says Lebel, including using a unicorn, an alien visiting earth and a family of Statues of Liberty. Executives also consulted a panel that examined the reactions of thousands of consumers.
Because consumers have already heard the “Biberty” phrase, says Lebel, the company believes there is less hard work to do to make the new ads connect. “We’re not manufacturing a mascot and hoping it sticks,” she says. “We’re taking something that people already know and repeat and just giving it a bigger role in the world.”
Liberty isn’t elevating Biberty at the expense of other established spokes-characters. Viewers who follow the company’s commercials are likely to have new encounters with the LiMu Emu – and Doug.