BORN LICENSING WINS AT THE 2021 LICENSING INTERNATIONAL EXCELLENCE AWARDS
We’re delighted to have been awarded ‘Best Licensed Promotion’ for Direct Line’s ‘We’re On It’ campaign featuring RoboCop, Bumblebee from Transformers, and Donatello from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
‘We’re on It’ by Saatchi & Saatchi for UK insurance company Direct Line launched in March 2020 with a world-first TV and VOD ad break takeover estimated to have reached 7.5 million people.
The winners of the 2021 Licensing International Excellence Awards were unveiled on August 24 in a virtual gathering that brought together nearly 1000 licensing industry executives from around the world to celebrate the best of the best.
The 22 award winners for different categories were selected from among 152 nominees from around the world who made the final ballot. More than 650 entries were received, and an elite global judging panel narrowed those entries down to the final ballot, which was voted on by members of the licensing industry at large.
Our Director, David Born, accepted the award on behalf of all parties: “It is so exciting to win this award for the second time. Thank you so much to everyone who voted for us. This really was a team effort, so I’d like to share this award with the Licensee, Direct Line, their creative agency, Saatchi & Saatchi London, and of course the wonderful teams at ViacomCBS, Hasbro, and MGM who were amazing partners throughout the process.”
The Winning Campaign
‘We’re On It’ centres around three cinematic action-packed spots directed by ‘King of the Super Bowl’ Bryan Buckley. Each character is the star of their own 60-second advert which sees our three iconic heroes spring into action to help people in need - only to find they’ve already been ‘outheroed’ by Direct Line. The campaign was supported by out-of-home, cinema, social, PR, and radio.
The latest data shows the campaign is 20% more effective at driving sales compared to Direct Line’s previous campaign, ‘The Fixer’. That’s saying something given the hugely popular and successful campaign won two IPA Effectiveness Gold awards and ran for six years.
In addition to recognition from the licensing world, the campaign was also met with critical acclaim within the advertising industry. The notoriously hard-to-impress marketing mogul, Mark Ritson, declared that “Direct Line has replaced one of the most effective brand campaigns of recent years with a new approach that promises similar success”, applauding the campaign for understanding “the power of characters in unlocking branded recall” (Marketing Week, 11 March 2020).
More importantly, the campaign was received rapturously by the franchise fans even leading to calls that Direct Line’s CGI version of Donatello, created entirely from scratch specifically for the campaign, be used in the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film.
You can read more about the work we did on this campaign here.
