The Corner's Tom Ewart on Beagle Street's New Spot

Insurance company Beagle Street has just launched a new campaign that introduces us to a new character; a cute, er...thing... who embodies a new approach to life insurance.

Created by The Corner and directed by Colonel Blimp's David Wilson the spot is unlike pretty much any other insurance commerical - you don't get fart gags at Direct Line. Below, The Corner's creative director, Tom Ewart, explains the thinking behind the campaign and how merchandising the company's new character is an important step.

Tell us a bit about the Beagle Street campaign; what was the brief the client approached you with?

Fifty per cent of people in the UK don’t have life insurance, and 96 per cent of those that do, don’t know what they are covered for. It’s an industry cloaked in confusion and mistrust. Beagle Street want to change this. They want to turn the whole thing on it’s head, and offer a simple, friendly life insurance service, online. No middlemen. No gobbledegook. No hidden catches. Our job was to re-brand and launch it.

Insurance advertising isn’t known for its sense of humour or adventure and this campaign harnesses both; was that something the client embraced?

Absolutely. In every meeting we had, from concept through to final execution, Matthew Gledhill (managing director of Beagle Street) would ask “is this going to cut through?”. As an agency we approached this as an opportunity to ignore all the codes of the category and create something completely fresh and engaging. Something that would really piss Aviva off (sorry Aviva!).

Where did the conversation start when you began talking about the character and how it should look?

The idea started around this notion of traditional life insurance being a bit of a nightmare. Greedy. Ugly. Fat. Unhelpful. The Gremlins cropped up a lot in our chats, and we started to sketch out this fiendish character that represented the old way of life insurance.

Then we wanted the new way to emerge from within this monster - a rebirth if you like - and our cute embodiment of the new approach was born. Not a Beagle, but part dog, part teddy, part thing. It had to be cute, and trustworthy, and polite and helpful. 

Tell us about the merchandising aspect of Beagle Street; the character is set to be released as a toy but was that the gameplan from the start or something that seem right as the character evolved?

No, not the game plan from the start - first we had to create this brand story and purpose - but once we had them visualised, it was clear that there was an opportunity to bring it to life in the real world too.

BGL, the parent company of Beagle Street, also own Compare The Market too, so they have a history of disrupting categories and merchandising the heroes.

BGL obviously knows a thing or two about character merchandising; do you think that merchandising has an ever-important role to play in advertising clients and products?

I think there’s an ever-important need for advertising to be good enough to make the leap from being something that is pushed at people, to something people pull at because they want more of it.

Merchandise is a pure form of this - like gaming and programming. It sets the creative bar high, because the brand is competing with everything popular culture has to offer, not just battling for 30 seconds of someone’s attention in an ad break. I guess we’ll have to wait to find out whether the character is charming enough to make people want it in their lives for keeps.

What did director David Wilson bring to the project?

If you haven’t worked with him yet, you should (but not until we’ve finished shooting the rest of the Beagle Street campaign with him). He’s directed music videos for Arcade Fire and the Arctic Monkeys.

We wanted to work with him because he’s got a great sense of humour. A generous sense of humour. And he has this filmic look to his work, that let us set our comedy in normal everyday scenarios without it looking too, well, everyday.

What was the most difficult part of the process in creating this campaign?

Getting the characters right. Creating them from scratch. Where do we start? When do we stop? How do we know when the eyes are big enough, or the amount of saliva is just right? Hours of Adventure Time, Pixar and Gumball helped.

When will we next see the character and how will it evolve?

We’re in development on the next two TV ads right now, and you can also find him at beaglestreet.com where he’ll help you create the right life insurance policy just for you. We have this plan for him to evolve in a really exciting way in the future, but I can’t divulge any more details at the moment.

Is a fart gag ever not funny?

We spent three days in 750MPH trying every other noise under the sun, but nothing made us laugh like the fart. So no, a fart gag is never not funny. In fact I think we scientifically proved it.