Liberty Biberty Is My Enemy

Get it out of here.

The background is important here, if only to fully spell out how weird this is, so let’s start there.

Many years ago, Liberty Mutual, a car insurance company, rolled out a campaign centered on the “LiMu Emu” and Doug, with the theory being that LiMu is short for Liberty Mutual and rhymes with emu and pairing him with a guy named Doug would be funny. They were cops, for some reason. I didn't mind these commercials, mostly because the guy who plays Doug is having some fun with it and because I’m a sucker for a corny loose cannon cop joke. It was dumb, but it was… fine… as far as any of these things go.

A little while later, things got meta. The campaign rolled out a commercial that featured auditions for a “new” Doug, with a hot bimbo male actor trying out for the role but mangling the company’s name and saying “Liberty Biberty” instead of Liberty Mutual. Then this became a thing, with that guy showing up in his own mini-campaign where he says “Liberty Biberty” every time as his catchphrase, which was an extremely “trying to make fetch happen” situation, but again, whatever. It was stupid – why does a commercial need backstory and lore??? – but mostly harmless. I'll take it over a political commercial. This is, admittedly, a bar so low you could roll a basketball over it, but it's all I ask.

Unfortunately...

If you've watched any amount of live television recently, especially sports, you have seen this godforsaken thing roughly 1000 times. It is a fuzzy yellow throw pillow with eyes and teeth and no arms or legs and it is named, you guessed it, Liberty Biberty.

I hate this thing so much. I hate its weird dead eyes and I hate that it’s being cynically jammed into the monoculture and I hate that my beloved Jim Henson Creature Shop had a hand in making it, which I learned from this huge article about the new campaign that is full of quotes I hate. Like, for example, this one…

“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.”

… and this one.

“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. 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 unaided awareness, is hugely important in this category.”

This all goes back to the Aflac duck. Or maybe the Geico cavemen. Or maybe the Geico gecko, who I refuse to blame for any of this because I find his little face and voice adorable, even if it makes me a hypocrite. Even the Cavemen, before they became A Thing with a whole television show, stemmed from a decent bit for a 30-second commercial. Companies have a limited amount of time to get their names burned into your brain and having an identifiable mascot helps. People have been buying hamburgers for decades because of a redheaded clown and his purple blob best friend and a masked bandit who wants to steal their dinner.

All of which is to say, to some degree, I get it. I just really don’t like this thing, specifically. I don’t even know why. I see it and I groan reflexively. It makes me, like, irritable, in so many different ways, including but not limited to:

As a consumer
As a fan of the Muppets
As a person who wrote the intro paragraphs of this blog from memory, without looking it up, because this information has apparently lodged itself into my brain in places that things like "the ages of my friends' children" should go
As a driver who has to share the road with a hypothetical person who chose their auto policy because of a sentient banana hairball and will probably rear-end me someday because they were using ChatGPT to figure out the best prompts to use on Google Gemini to leave a funny reply in a group chat filled with their oldest real-world friends

And it looks like I’m not going to be free of it any time soon.

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.

My initial reaction to this was to say, “I hope there's a crossover and Doug shoots it,” but then I realized that would just lead to a dozen commercials about its funeral and grieving wife and its grown adult son out for revenge. I can’t risk encouraging them like that. So, instead, I’ll keep this as simple as I can…

Liberty Biberty is my enemy. I must destroy it myself.

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