The earliest known advertisement is a 3,000-5,000-year-old scrap of papyrus from Thebes, Egypt offering a reward for a runaway slave named Shem. Ads remained fairly straightforward throughout the millennia up until their Cambrian explosion in the 20th century, generated by groundbreaking communication technology and an industry established to sell people products with it. Though their field enjoyed a brief period of artfulness—or so I’ve allowed Mad Men to convince me—the care and craft ad men and women once put into their pitches is long gone. Audience attention spans and commercial lengths are the shortest they’ve ever been, so some Madison Avenue suits are now resorting to the tactics discovered and perfected by the news and social media organizations: capturing your attention through visceral repulsion.

Or so that would appear to be the case with car insurance giant Liberty Mutual’s controversial new mascot. He’s a spherical ball of yellow fur named Liberty Biberty and people fucking hate him. In just a few weeks, the collective outrage has escalated from isolated social media takedowns to a recent segment on Last Week Tonight in which John Oliver essentially declared a jihad on the puppet. One poor future regretter even got a tattoo of Liberty Biberty being churned into ground meat. A few days ago, the hate campaign entered an entirely new phase as several dozen people took to the streets in Boston to protest in front of the insurance company’s headquarters.

If you don’t watch much live TV, pay for the ad-free versions of streaming platforms, and avoid certain gas pumps, you might have missed the ad campaign that kicked off this summer with Liberty Biberty’s commercial debut .

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