Strider the fox

WHY Strider

According to a survey conducted by Fortune, a whopping 54 percent of the world’s most admired companies use mascots as a means of communication in their marketing campaigns.

The goal is to bring characters to life with emotional narratives, creativity, and artistic expression to tell the story of the learning experience. As we are having the Knox as a kids’ companion, we want it more realistic look when it comes out of the screen and into the real world interacting with kids and families in a high-fidelity manner.

How
we did

One of the most exciting moments of creating an animation in which a character has dialogue is hearing it for the first time. After writing the script, we had a voice actress (the amazing Linnea Sage) record Strider’s lines and also incidental sounds, called “efforts,” that Strider would make as they interacted in the scene, making them feel more real.

We need a voice that is still playful but more clear and easy to understand in a very limited, 30-second delivery. The existing voice works well for a very young audience, but we are hoping to expand our reach to K–8. We propose keeping a gender-neutral voice that is energetic, like the existing voice, but using a voice actor that is less high pitched—an attribute that is associated with young children’s programming.

WHat we made

Final 30-second TV Commercial

One of our biggest winners last year was Strider the Fox. We took Strider from the online learning platform, worked with an agency to animate them, and found success leveraging Strider in our advertising. The ad was one of our top performing ads—with a $50 lower cost per lead than our typical creative.

User Generated Content using the AI filter.

For the #k12unbox campaign, we had 2.7K submissions at K12 Unbox TINT

Organic Social Post: Help us name our fox: May 23, 2021

12,723 organic reach

309 comments

962 clicks

4.82% engagement rate

Strider’s been a huge hit with our kids and families, and now they’re part of the conversation. Thousands of our families participated in our unboxing campaign last summer. Here you can see our kids who had colored Strider on the page that came in their box last summer.

We envision this being a big hit with our families and helping us generate even more user-generated content this year. And having them share their pics of Strider helps get word of mouth out there, helping on the acquisition side. It also demonstrates that we’re tech-forward and on-trend from the brand perspective.