The Story Behind Our New Mascot
If you listen to the Beervana Show (or podcast), you may have already encountered the newest critter to join the team. Her name is Maris (the?) Otter. We’re not sure about the article (Smokey Bear or Smokey the Bear?), but we are sure Maris is a she. The source of her name, of course, is the famous 55-year-old British barley variety.
The inspiration behind Maris was a lark. Toward the end of the year I was spending a lot of time on 538 and listening to the site’s podcast. In a moment of absurdist inspiration, they introduced “Fivey Fox,” a Twitter character they could use to announce otherwise dry polling data. Eventually they leaned into the character and his tweets developed personality and perspective. It was an excellent way to introduce some lightheartedness into a wonky, often divisive field of election-forecasting. Of course, Fivey was hardly original. Companies have been using mascots for decades to humanize their sales pitches and give a storyline to marketing campaigns. I thought, “Hey, why don’t we have a mascot?” We joked about it on a couple of shows and solicited input. When Will suggested the Maris Otter, it was too good to ignore and we threw it to artists and doodlers to send us something we could use. Given our standards and expectations, we figured anyone with marginal skill, five minutes, and a cocktail napkin could provide what we needed.
What we didn’t expect was the work Jordan Wilson did, which not only blew off our socks, but introduced us to the opaque, mysterious world of graphic design and branding. We discuss that over the course of two podcasts (link below), but I wanted to delve more deeply into how we ended up with this insanely cute mascot.
A couple days after our request went out, Jordan Wilson pinged me and offered to whip something up. Fantastic! He was the creative director at Old Town Brewing who made amazing, shareable short movies in one of the best marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen. I naively assumed that in requesting “a sketch of an otter,” we’d given him all he needed. I was surprised when he probed, asking what we were looking for. But of course he needed direction. It’s possible to do about anything with a character. Fivey wears glasses to suggest he is a smart nerd, and the art is childlike. By contrast, Oregon State decided to take their cute mascot, the beaver, and make him macho (🤔). Mascots can convey action or stasis, inspire fervor or amusement, and critically, may strengthen someone’s emotional engagement or leave them cold.
I didn’t give Jordan a lot to work with, and I assume that’s typical. I have a primitive sense of graphic design and, like most people, haven’t broken down why I like or dislike different aesthetic choices. I told him, “Our ‘brand’ is lo-fi. He could be holding/interacting with a beer or not. I think the main thing is he should raise a smile, even if it’s the kind children offer after an especially daddish dad joke.” I added, sincerely, that I didn’t expect him to spend more than 13 minutes on it. I was only offering a signed copy of a book as payment, after all.
The original sketch.
That’s not a lot to go on, yet Jordan came back with the full-realized concept we debuted yesterday. And while I wasn’t thinking of it in a sophisticated way, he was.
“I started to explore how the mark could possibly work in a variety of applications; different crops and orientations, color ways, hierarchy, etc,” he wrote back. “I find it exciting to visualize how the brand can operate beyond a simple mark. The context and usage of a good brand identity is often as important as the artwork itself.”
I suppose we’d thought of Maris as a mark, sort of, but more in the sense of another way to add dimension to the show. We have our silly musical cues, our established format, and have developed tropes over the years (“five stars, please!”). Adding a mascot seemed like the sensible next move. I’ve been bad about finding sponsors, and so we have mostly done this for fun. We don’t operate a proper radio show so much as cosplay hosts. Still, ears in, we have thousands of listeners, and somehow do have a radio show. So perhaps Maris is something like branding, even if what she represents is rather thin.
“Overall, I leaned into this ‘throwback PNW meets park ranger, kids baseball mascot, and retro beer’ vibe. Something very approachable and fun—that feels low pressure, casual (lo-fi) but without compromising on the craftsmanship (well made). But mostly, an adorable otter that anyone would love to dive in and have a beer with.”
For actual businesses like Old Town, 54-40, and Foreland who have hired Jordan to create or rework their brands, the stakes are a lot higher. We recently went through a week in which everyone in the country was focused on Anchor Brewing’s rebrand—overwhelmingly negatively. (Even a college friend of mine who lives in SF and never drinks or thinks about beer emailed a link asking about it.) Using visual symbols, colors, and fonts, designers must synthesize what a company wants to communicate about their personality. It’s a really challenging task to take in what people in a company say they want to accomplish, usually in a way no more sophisticated than my sense of Maris Otter, and make it align. I now have a slightly better idea of how that process works, and I am so delighted we have Maris now. We’ll have to figure out merch next, because people will delight in having such a happy little creature around. (I plan to give Jordan a whole set of books, too.)
If you want to hear more, Jordan goes deeper on all of this in our two-part interview, and you can start this week with the first half.