Prudential Ethics Mascots Design & Animation

Client: Prudential
Project Title: Ethics Mascots Design and Animation

BACKGROUND
Prudential is one of the top life insurance companies in Singapore, serving the financial and protection needs of the country’s citizens for 90 years. The company delivers a suite of well-rounded product offerings in Protection, Savings and Investment through multiple distribution channels, including a network of more than 5,000 financial consultants.

BRIEF
Prudential had a fun ‘design a mascot’ project that involved Prudential staff/agents coming up with the mascot concepts and drawing characters. They reached out to us to help convert these raw mascot drawings into more professional stylised vector-style illustrations that can be used across their Ethics collateral.

On top of that, they wanted us to craft and produce an internal animation video about the ethical standards in Prudential featuring the mascots. The goal of the video is to inspire employees to integrate ethical thinking and decision-making in all they do. The video should make the idea of ethics less abstract, more approachable and easy to understand.

RESPONSE
After collecting the initial drawings and sketches from Prudential employees, we spent approximately a week fine-tuning and finalising these sketches into mascot illustrations with different poses and facial expressions.

Once mascot illustrations were approved, we developed a 2D animation showing three different mascots (animals) in action: Ethel the Elephant, Trusty the Dolphin, and Shortcut the Crab. Ethel and Trusty embody an ethical, dependable, and trusted sales agent or employee. Meanwhile, Shortcut represents someone lazy who cuts corners to achieve something quickly, a big no-no in Prudential.

The video shows the ethical dilemmas that a sales agent or employee may face in Prudential, such as unethical sales tactics, shortcuts in performance, and conflict of interest with clients. Ethel and Trusty always do the right thing when facing these situations, whereas Shortcut always takes what’s convenient for him, putting his own interest above the clients.

By including these daily scenarios with cute animated animals, the viewers that consist of all personnel and potential recruits in Prudential have an easier time understanding the abstract idea of ethics. They can put themselves in the characters’ shoes with ease.

OUTCOME

The output video was played internally and was posted on their social media.