What’s yellow, fluffy, and has a name that will probably stick in your head? The new television star of the insurance sector.

Liberty Mutual worked its way into consumers’ brains over the past decade with a series of ads featuring a hard-to-forget slogan (just repeat the company name several times while singing) along with a bizarre cast of characters that includes a “Limu Emu” and a guy named Doug. Starting this week, Liberty joins the clique with “Liberty Biberty,” a fuzzy anthropomorphic character who symbolizes the feeling a consumer has when purchasing insurance at a fair price.

The character may seem strange, but the strategy behind him is anything but.

The expression “Liberty Biberty” has appeared in the insurance company’s campaigns since 2019, when an advertising personality known as “Bad Actor” uttered it while trying to audition for a spot in the campaign. Now, says Jenna Lebel, marketing director for Liberty’s U.S. retail market, the saying is a well-known piece of intellectual property that the company can deploy intelligently.

“That phrase just took on a life of its own. It caught on quickly. People repeated it. They even sometimes call our company ‘Liberty Biberty,'” he says. “I think brands can spend years and millions of dollars trying to build something like that, and we already have it. So instead of ignoring it, we leaned into it and that gave us an opportunity.”

Add the creature to the growing ranks of characters deployed in commercials to help insurance companies differentiate themselves from one another. Over the decades, the average consumer has probably encountered Jake from State Farm; Progressive’s Flo and her colleagues Jamie and Mara, not to mention Dr. Rick; Allstate Chaos; Geico Gecko; Professor Burke of Farmers Insurance; and, of course, the famous Aflac duck.

Despite the apparent ubiquity of its advertising, Liberty is not the largest ad sponsor in the industry. The company spends significantly more than competitors such as State Farm, Geico, Allstate and Progressive, according to 2025 data from Dowling & Partners, a research firm that focuses on the insurance sector.

Finding the right fictional character to talk about insurance has become key. “Unfortunately, as an insurance company, we don’t have a tangible product, so I think that’s why the entire category relies on brand cues or brand devices, like brand personas, to really establish that link,” Lebel says. “Consumers, when they buy insurance, buy only a few brands, and it is always the first brands that come to mind. Therefore, knowing or not knowing what is most important is enormously important in this category.”

The characters are quirky and, over many years, become part of a larger story as the audience learns more about them. However, at some point, even a favorite guest runs the risk of becoming unwanted. That’s why many insurance companies keep adding eccentric personalities to their roster. Many businesses may also fear the inevitable stage where consumers begin to ignore ads because they have seen the same ads, or seen ads with the same themes, multiple times. That dynamic has played a bigger role in marketers’ decisions since the advent of big streaming services, which often show fewer commercials overall but can send them to certain subscribers multiple times during a viewing experience.

To highlight, Liberty Mutual turned to Jim Henson Creature Shop and puppeteer Grant Baciocco, who voices the new character. “Puppets just bring a lot of joy and entertainment,” Lebel says, and the people at Henson “are the experts in that area.” In the coming weeks, sports fans will be able to find the new campaign not only in commercials but also in integrations during NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” and ESPN’s “Sports Center,” Lebel says. “We’re still exploring” additional partnerships, he adds.

The yellow creature was just one of the concepts Liberty Mutual considered. The company looked at dozens of different concepts, Lebel says, including the use of a unicorn, an alien visiting Earth and a family of Statues of Liberty. Executives also consulted a panel that examined the reactions of thousands of consumers.

Because consumers have already heard the phrase “Biberty,” Lebel says, the company believes there is less work to do to make the new ads connect. “We’re not making a mascot and hoping it sticks,” he says. “We’re taking something that people already know and repeat and just giving it a bigger role in the world.”

Freedom is not elevating Biberty at the expense of other established spokespersons. Viewers who follow the company’s commercials are likely to have new encounters with LiMu Emu and Doug.