Copper Giants Case Study

Copper Giants
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.

My Role
Co-Founder, Head of Creative

Tenure
2017 – 2020

Team Growth
8 → 16

Notable Work
LiMu Emu & Doug

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, restructured to work more like an agency: multidisciplinary, high-craft, fast, with the brand knowledge no external partner could replicate.

By insourcing 80% of Liberty Mutual's creative work, we changed what creativity cost.

  • $3.5M saved annually

The savings funded better work, and better work attracted better talent, which is what made the model sustainable.

A collage of promotional and branding images for Liberty Mutual Insurance. Features include a yellow and blue color theme, employee and customer interactions, social media and digital marketing displays, pet insurance advertisement with a puppy, and business cards.

Brand Refresh

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.

Facebook advertisements from Liberty Mutual Insurance featuring a yellow background, an ostrich, a man in a yellow shirt, and text about savings and customizing insurance.
Three digital advertisements for Liberty Mutual Insurance on a yellow background. The ads feature a man with sunglasses and a mustache standing with his arms crossed and pointing, a person with a llama and colorful flowers, and a man with sunglasses standing with arms crossed. Text on the ads reads 'Spring is here,' 'We customize. You could save $782,' and 'and so are the savings.'
Advertisement for Liberty Mutual Insurance featuring a man taking a selfie with a large bird wearing sunglasses on his shoulder on a yellow background, with text promoting saving money on insurance.
Three digital advertisements for Liberty Mutual Insurance with a yellow background, text promoting savings and customization, images of people wearing glasses and a parrot, and the Liberty Mutual logo at the bottom.

Expanding Reach

Great creative doesn't matter if it never reaches the right people. We built a paid channel strategy that took our strongest brand work and put it in front of the audiences most likely to act on it, without stripping out the craft that made it worth watching in the first place.

LiMu Emu and Doug Social Case Study

Defining LiMu Emu and Doug

LiMu and Doug existed as a rough concept when we took over. My team defined them: gave them a voice, a dynamic, a narrative presence for the first time, and took them from mascots to the emotional center of the brand.

Stunt Video

LiMu Emu’s Farm Fresh Eggs Infomercial

World Egg Day Social 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 was proving the LiMu platform could live outside paid media and still command attention on its own.

YouTube: Dynamic pre-roll tailored to viewer behavior rather than broad demographic targeting.

Cinema: Dialing Liberty

Cinema: Finding Coverage

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 hard 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.

Results

Under the Copper Giants model, Liberty Mutual's unaided brand awareness grew from 17% to 30%.

That's the case for in-house creative: it saves money and grows the brand at the same time. Most teams only get credit for one of those.