SLee and Topher

Two Guys on Gaming, Tech, and the World

9 Famous Tech Mascots and Their Colorful Backstories

March 15, 2014 By SLee Leave a Comment

Sports teams aren’t the only brands with popular mascots.

To amp up visibility and create consumer connections, companies like Bitly and TiVo design fun mascots to get users more invested in their products. A successful campaign can go viral and help propel certain brands to household names. You can’t think of Energizer without picturing its bunny, just like you can’t imagine Geico without the gecko.

Let’s examine nine such mascots and their mysterious origins.

1. Domo for NHK

Domo for NHK

IMAGE: FLICKR, SEAN NABER

Domo is the fearsome monster mascot for Japan’s NHK-TV. Created by animator Tsuneo Goda, the brown creature first appeared in stop-motion animation ads for the station.

“One night, I was up late, and I started drawing circles, squares, general shapes. As I was looking at it, a story came up in my head,” Goda says in an interview with About.com. “That’s how Domo came about — just a bunch of shapes put together.”

The mini-monster is now famous in his own right, featured in merchandise and comic books.

2. TiVo’s TV

TiVo TV

IMAGE: FLICKR, SEAN KELLEY

Anyone with a TiVo set will recognize its ever-smiling mascot, thanks to designer Michael Cronan’s determination.

“I wanted to provide a kind of identity that would become as recognizable as the mouse ears are to Disney,” he says in an interview with PVRblog.

A mascot that looked like a TV was the obvious path, so Cronan stuck a smile under the logo and added rabbit ears, as a nod to a vintage small screen era. He then added the legs after seeing “the little Darwinian fish-with-legs evolution character on a bumper sticker.”

3. Android’s Android

Android

IMAGE: FLICKR, MARSMETTN TALLAHASSEE

TiVo has a TV, and Android has…well, an android. Designer Irina Blok created the green robot while at Google in 2007, inspired by the male and female pictograms found on bathroom doors.

4. Energizer Bunny

Energizer Bunny

IMAGE: FLICKR, TODD L. GILBERT

Energizer hit the mascot goldmine with its ubiquitous, sunglasses- and sandals-sporting bunny. For the past 25 years, the sassy animal has been drumming it up commercials and moving product for the battery company.

The mascot was developed in 1989 to mock Duracell battery ads, which featured pink bunnies. Artist Eric Allard designed the one-off concept, but it grew in popularity — and kept going and going and going…

5. Travelocity’s Roaming Gnome

Travelocity Traveling Gnome

IMAGE: FLICKR, CORY GURMAN

In the 1980s, a prank was born where people stole garden gnomes, photographed them at various locations, then sent pictures back to the gnome’s owner. It persisted through the mid-2000s, parodied and popularized in films like Amelie.

It also inspired Philip Marchington, a creative director at the McKinney agency. He used the prank as a basis for a campaign for Travelocity, a travel website. The Roaming Gnome became wildly popular, and has his own Twitter and background story (he left home for eight years to pursue a life of travel).

6. Yesware Yeti

Yesware Yeti

IMAGE: Yesware

Yesware is all about yetis. The email productivity service designed the goofy green monster to represent the company’s “friendly yet quirky” culture, says Eileen Ani, Yesware’s designer and engineer.

7. Twitter Bird

Twitter Bird "Larry"

IMAGE: FLICKR, PRACHATAI

Twitter’s crisp little logo was stumbled upon, rather than hatched by an advert team. The site’s founders were looking on iStockphoto, a popular source for stock pictures, when they came across a bird drawing by a contributor named Simon Oxley. They bought the design (along with a robot drawing which appears when a link is broken) and used it (but have since redesigned it to its minimal, modern look).

*Fun fact, the mascot’s name is Larry (which mysteriously bears a similarity to famous basketball player, Larry Bird).

8. Reddit’s Snoo

Reddit Snoo

IMAGE: FLICKR, MARTIN LAFRANCE

Reddit, the popular online community, had a mascot before it was even conceived. While a student at UVA in 2005, the site’s co founder, Alexis Ohanian, doodled the little alien with orange-red eyes and named it Snoo.

“I had no reason for choosing an alien. I just really wanted a mascot for our website (which at this point we hadn’t even begun working on),” Ohanian wrote in a Reddit thread.

The alien got its moniker because Ohanian originally planned on calling Reddit “Snew,” a shortening of “What’s New.” The spelling deviated from there.

9. Bitly Pufferfish

Bitly Pufferfish

IMAGE: FLICKR, MIKE FABIO

Bitly, the link-shortening website, found a fitting mascot in the expanding and contracting pufferfish. It was the brainchild of the company’s CTO, Todd Levy, and Betaworks employee, Neil Wehrle, who told Mashable in an interview they wanted it to be “more of a beach ball than a poisonous fish that can hurt you.”

BONUS: Geico Gecko

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AneiWAL3QFI

VIDEO: YOUTUBE, BONNIE DAVIS

What’s the first car insurance company you can name? It’s probably Geico, thanks to the ad men of the Martin Agency. However, the talking lizard wasn’t supposed to exist.

The mascot had to be whipped up during the Screen Actor’s Guild protest, which prevented the company from using live actors in a commercial. Thus, the Martin minds came together and produced the first gecko spot, riffing off the animal’s naming similarity. The British lizard became a viral hit, and is still going strong in commercials nearly 15 years later.

*Fun fact: The gecko was originally voiced by actor Kelsey Grammar.

Source

Filed Under: Featured, Viral Tagged With: Alexis Ohanian, Amelie, Android, Betaworks, Bitly, Domo, Duracell, Eileen Ani, Energizer, Eric Allard, Geico, gnome, Irina Blok, Kelsey Grammar, Martin Agency, mascot, NHK, Philip Marchington, Reddit, Simon Oxley, Snoo, TiVO, Todd Levy, Travelocity, Twitter, Yesware

Get More Stuff Like This In Your Inbox!

Sign up for more free content from SLee and Topher, delivered straight to your inbox.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Get the Best Games

Looking for something new to play? Check out BestGamesList.com for the best games 2017 has to offer.

Connect with S&T

Get Free Updates

Enter your email address for free updates on video games and technology from SLee And Topher.

Support SLee & Topher and earn rewards using Ebates:
Ebates Coupons and Cash Back

Must See Stories

Netflix Download and Go

Downloading TV Shows and Movies on Netflix

Retrieve iPhone IMEI

Android Wear: Google’s Wearables Platform Is Here

Domo for NHK

9 Famous Tech Mascots and Their Colorful Backstories

Official ‘Batman: Arkham Knight’ Trailer Reveals Driveable Batmobile

Site Builder Banner for iPage – 250x250

Copyright © 2025 ·Magazine Pro Theme · Genesis Framework by StudioPress · WordPress · Log in