Born Licensing to offer ‘Creative with Character’ workshops for adland creatives
Leading licensing agent Born Licensing has announced it will offer workshops to help creatives navigate the challenges involved with incorporating famous fictional characters into their work.
Workshop for creatives
It comes after Born Licensing discovered that 85% of industry creatives believe that using film and TV characters more frequently would help their work to gain more attention. However, 100% of industry creatives had experienced campaigns where the IP did not go ahead due to preconceptions of licensed character use.(1)
Born Licensing want to inspire creatives to be bold when it comes to working with characters. ‘Creative with Character’ will cover the basics of licensing, different ways characters and IP can be licensed and top tips for creatives working with characters. It will also provide attendees with a behind the scenes look at how characters from some of Born Licensing’s most famous campaigns came to life, including He-Man and Skeletor for Moneysupermarket and RoboCop, Donatello and Bumblebee for Direct Line.
The offering follows a busy 3-month period where Born Licensing ran workshops for agency production and business affairs teams. The presentations were focused on how to navigate around the perceived challenges of working with characters and IP. Agencies of all sizes attended the virtual presentations including McCann, TBWA, Leo Burnett, Engine, BBH, Ogilvy and more.
In April, Born Licensing launched their first ever ad campaign, ‘Don’t Say Can*t’, which brought together 7 iconic fictional characters in an effort to tackle the ‘can’t do’ attitude that sometimes exists in agency meeting rooms when it comes to working with characters.
Earlier in the year the agent launched their first white paper ‘A Case for Characters’ which focused on how and why fictional characters are currently under-utilised in advertising. The report showed that 38% of UK adults most like to see fictional characters in advertising – 78% more than celebrities or musicians, and 111% more than sports stars (2). Despite this, celebrities, musicians, and sports stars are 13.4 times more likely to appear in UK ads than fictional characters (3).
Born Licensing’s Founder & Director, David Born, commented:
“Our research clearly demonstrates an appetite among creatives to work with characters and IP more, but there are various barriers currently preventing this work from being produced. The purpose of these workshops is to help creatives understand how to best approach working with characters and to boost their confidence when coming across this in the future.”
The virtual workshops will take place throughout July, August and September and are available to be booked directly now by emailing contact@bornlicensing.com or clicking on the link below.
1. SurveyMonkey poll conducted by Born Licensing among 42 advertising agency representatives, November 2020
2. Ipsos MORI surveyed over 1000 nationally representative UK adults ages 16 – 75, November 2020
3. Born Licensing review of 4,032 UK ads from 2018-2020 https://sourcecreative.com
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