Born Licensing to Offer ‘Creative with Character’ Workshops for Adland Creatives

Leading licensing agent Born Licensing has announced that it will offer workshops to help creatives navigate the challenges involved with incorporating famous fictional characters into their work. 

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

‘Creative with Character’ will cover the basics of licensing, different ways characters and IP can be licensed and top tips for creatives when 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 work came to life, including He-Man and Skeletor for Moneysupermarket and Robocop, Donatello and Bumblebee for Direct Line. 

The offering follows a busy three-month period where Born Licensing ran workshops for agency production and business affairs teams. The presentations focused on the top challenges currently preventing scripts with characters and IP from being produced and how to best tackle them. Agencies of all sizes attended the virtual presentations including McCann, TBWA, Leo Burnett, Engine, BBH, Ogilvy and more. 

David Born, founder of Born Licensing, comments: “Our research clearly demonstrates an appetite among creatives to work with characters and IP more, but it also shows that 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 going about this in the future. 

In April Born Licensing launched their first ever ad campaign, ‘Don’t Say Can*t’, which brought together seven 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 licensing 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 stars2. Despite this, celebrities, musicians and sports stars are 13.4 times more likely to appear in UK ads than fictional characters 3.

The virtual workshops are free of charge and will take place throughout July, August and September. Bookings can be made by emailing contact@bornlicensing.com.  

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}