SAITO
TV Commercial series | Character Development | Anicom Sompo | 2016-2017
Business can be wild. Be prepared.
Animal related dad-jokes for sale.
Sai is the Japanese for rhinoceros and is also part of the Japanese kanji for fire insurance (KaSai Hoken) and Anicom wanted to move from pet insurance into fire insurance. This never went anywhere, mind you, so don’t go looking on their webpage for getting your house covered. That leads us to another dad-joke. Getting “covered” for insurance gave play to the idea of a hippo character as well. Hippo in Japanese is “kaba” which sounds like “cover” to a lot of Japanese people. Those designs are at the bottom. In the end, the company decided to stay in their lane, but not without a venture into some web and TV commercials promoting the company, if not the product.
There were so so many ideas. Gorillas, bears, Russian house-sprites, a whole zoo of characters. Some cartoonish, some more realistic. We pitched everything. It was a very bold set of choices that lead the client from one end of the spectrum to the other. Most all of this was internal and only sees the light of the internet years after the ideas are scrapped. Anicom has currently decided to table all character plans and their current branding can be seen on their web page.
