3 Ways with...Cartoon Characters

Most of our formative years were spent in front of TVs watching cartoons, which probably explains why we're all so violent, pop culture-literate, and why we let a real life cartoon become US president.

Brands are more than willing to tap into this nostalgia with spots featuring familar faces from our pasts. Read our guide to the best strategies for using cartoon characters in your ads to do more than just create empty nostalgia in your spots, and relieve ads from Halifax, YouTube and Yamaha featuring some top 'toons.

1. From Cartoon into Real World

Most cartoons live in very different world from us, with different rules of physics, which animals can talk, and different moral codes about the acceptability of hitting people with frying pans. So a number of ads have had a lot of pun crashing the crazy cartoon world into our grey every day.

Halifax: Scooby Doo
Agency: adam&eveDDB

Zoinks! One such ad was the best of Halifax's series of ads featuring beloves kid's TV characters, including spots featuring Top Cat, Thunderbirds and The Flintstones. In this one, Shaggy and Scooby fall into a bank branch whilst on the run from a Mummy.

Crunchyroll: Café Anime
Agency: Ntropic (San Francisco)

Anike streaming service Crunchyroll, meanwhile, bring to life our wishes that we lived in the world of our favourite cartoon in this spot where anime starts leaking into the real world into a bar as a man watches anime on his phone.

2. From Real World into Cartoon

Other brands have had much success going the other way, bringing live action elements into a cartoon world and letting us relive the childhood dream we all had of crawling into the TV world, even if that world is full of homicidal talking animals.

Sky Movies: The Mission
Agency: WCRS

Sky Movies have bcome the masters of this approach across five years of Christmas ads with WCRS that saw people stepping into their favourite movies. Previous years saw a Dad entering into It's a Wonderful Life, or a family entering into Frozen and the Lego Movie, but the best of the ads was their 2015 offering that saw a girl trying to get rid of sprouts across movies including Big Hero 6.

YouTube: Homer Simpson Saves the Day
Agency: Camp + King

"Mr Plow, that's my name, that name again is Mr Plow". Maybe the most famous ad of all time becomes a real spot for YouTube's business advertising services that sees the streaming service enter Springfield and save Homer's ploughing business.

3. Pastiche it!

What should you do if you can't get the rights to a cartoon property, or want to create a certain mood without relying on certain characters? A little retro pastiche, creating a nostalgic cartoon world familar to your viewers without the baggage of that property... 

AIDES: Smutley
Agency: Goodby Silverstein & Partners

...then use that pastiche to make a Felix the Cat-style character bang his way through a whole barnyard, including a gimp pig and a whale whose blowhole gets buggered. This spot for French AIDS charity AIDES manages to make a serious statement without ever feeling bleak, and making a seriously memorable spot - where else are you going to see a fish in a fishtank forced to fellate a feline? Actually, there are definitely dark parts of the web we in no way condone where that's probably viewable.

Yamaha MT07: Rise Up Your Darkness
Agency: DLV BBDO 

Where that spots takes an adult take on a kid's cartoon, Yamaha take the more adult-orientated world of anime and double down on the darkness to promote their new bike. Part Akira, part Ghost in the Shell, and part Disney's Tron, it turns their bike into the ideal boy's toy.

Click here for our 3 Ways With... guide to the most perfect and perverse adverts featuring puppets.