The Aflac duck sure knows how to take a calculated risk.
This Saturday, the obnoxiously loudmouthed fowl is slated to appear in a commercial touting not just insurance but also the new Disney-Pixar film “Up,” which involves the rather dangerous idea of a flying house. He’ll also grace driver Carl Edwards’s racecar as it speeds around the track at the Southern 500 NASCAR race at Darlington Raceway the same day.
But it’s neither airborne disaster nor road rage the duck needs protection from. It’s anything that might, ahem, foul his image.
And supplying that kind of protection, in this multiparty promotional deal involving Aflac, Disney-Pixar, Roush Fenway Racing, Ford Motor Co. and driver Edwards, was Aflac Associate Counsel Jensen Melton’s job.
As sole counsel for Aflac, she worked with in-house lawyers from Disney-Pixar on contract, licensing and trademark issues surrounding the famous fowl.
“This [deal] was a little more complex than I’m used to in that we were taking some of our intellectual property, namely, the duck—and for me, my job is protecting the duck—and we were taking this beloved piece of property to another company and letting them animate it according to their process,” says Melton. “So from my standpoint, from an ownership standpoint, it was sort of a frightening thing.”
Easy to see why: Since the duck took flight as Aflac’s prime marketing tool in 2000, the $16.6 billion company’s brand recognition has grown from 11 percent to around 94 percent.
In the commercial, the duck is shown offering financial help to the hero of “Up,” Disney’s first 3-D film, about a balloon salesman who ties thousands of balloons to his house and, with an 8-year-old stowaway aboard, flies to South America.
“We had … creative control over the content of the commercial, so we knew, even though we were partnering with Pixar for custom animation … what the duck was going to be doing and what the voiceover theme would be,” she says.
Melton says Aflac has a license from Disney for the commercial. “There really isn’t a specific fees portion,” she says. “We addressed it from more of a promotional tie-in angle, as in what could we give each other, as opposed to a license fee issue. … A lot of it has not been monetarily based.”
According to Nielsen statistics cited in Adweek, Aflac spent about $80 million on U.S. media in 2008.
Aflac also has a deal with Roush Fenway to “wrap,” as the lingo goes, the Aflac 99 Ford Fusion racecar that Edwards will drive at the Southern 500 in duck- and Up-related graphics.
“When you get companies the size of Aflac and Disney-Pixar together, I thought this would be difficult,” Melton says. “But this was one of the easier contract negotiations we’ve had for it to be such a major deal.”
“Up” is scheduled to open in theatres May 29.