LIBERTY MUTUAL | COPPER GIANTS | FULL CASE STUDY
Building an Agency Inside an Insurance Company
When I joined Liberty Mutual in 2017, I was brought in to help reshape their internal creative department, a team of about eight, into something that could compete with the best external agencies.
Two years later, Copper Giants had delivered $3.5M in annual savings, grown Liberty Mutual's unaided brand awareness from 17% to 30%, and built a creative culture that people in the industry were writing about. Here's the full story.
Building Copper Giants
Liberty Mutual's creative had been spread across too many external vendors. The work was inconsistent, expensive, and disconnected from the brand in ways that only get worse at scale. A well-run internal team was the answer.
As part of the leadership team that built Copper Giants, I helped design the org, set the creative standards, and scale the team from eight to sixteen. Not just bigger. Different. Restructured to work more like an agency: multidisciplinary, high-craft, fast, with the brand knowledge that no external partner could replicate.
By insourcing 80% of Liberty Mutual's creative work, we changed what creativity cost.
$3.5M saved annually, structural not one-time
The savings funded better work. The better work attracted better talent. The better talent made the savings sustainable.
Unifying the Brand
Liberty Mutual's brand had drifted. National TV looked different from regional print. Digital felt disconnected from in-agent experiences. Decades of decentralized execution had taken their toll.
We fixed it by going deeper than the logo. We built a unified visual identity, custom photography, a modular design system, and a self-service brand portal that let every team maintain brand consistency without needing to come back to us for every asset. The whole organization became its own brand steward.
Expanding Reach
Creative excellence only works if it finds the right audience. We built a paid social strategy designed to take our strongest brand work and extend it to the audiences most likely to act on it. Layering targeted, performance-driven creative over brand storytelling let us connect with high-intent audiences at scale, without sacrificing the craft that made the work worth promoting.
Defining LiMu Emu and Doug
We didn't inherit finished characters. We defined them. LiMu and Doug existed as a visual concept when we took over. My team gave them a voice, a dynamic, and a narrative presence for the first time. The characters went from mascots to the emotional center of the brand.
The Emu Egg Stunt
Before World Egg Day, we stocked grocery stores with oversized emu eggs and filmed real people discovering them, a hidden-camera experiment made with the creators of Punk'd. The point wasn't the stunt itself. It was proving that the LiMu platform could live outside paid media and still command attention.
YouTube & Cinema
We ran two tests in partnership with YouTube, both designed to push what branded video could do.
First: dynamic pre-roll tailored to viewer behavior rather than broad demographic targeting.
9.7% increase in ad recall
2.3% boost in consideration over standard benchmarks
Second: genre-bending movie trailers. Same actors, same sets, same dialogue, different genres, mirroring the way Liberty Mutual customizes coverage. Ran on over 10,000 screens.
28.4M cinema impressions
Karaoke Jingle
The Liberty Mutual jingle had already become one of the most recognized sounds in insurance advertising. The question was how to extend it into digital environments it wasn't designed for.
The answer: 6-second ads of real people performing it like they were doing karaoke, off-key and enthusiastic. The format turned an existing sonic asset into a short-form disruption that was impossible to ignore.
SMS Campaign
We launched a campaign to drive SMS usage in Liberty Mutual's claims process, a friction-reduction initiative wrapped in creative.
998% above projected success rate in the first two weeks
Not a brand campaign. A process improvement with a creative brief.
