Sesame Street’s Big Bird is a beloved children’s char­ac­ter that spans gen­er­a­tions and bor­ders, but it’s not only kids who can learn from him. In fact, mar­keters specif­i­cal­ly can look to this per­pet­u­al­ly 6‑year-old 8‑foot-tall yel­low bird for wis­dom applic­a­ble to their own indus­try.

At Adver­tis­ing Week, the pup­peteer behind Big Bird – there has been only one since Sesame Street debuted in 1969 – sat down with Scott Dona­ton, chief con­tent offi­cer at mar­ket­ing and tech­nol­o­gy agency Dig­i­tasLBi, to talk about his near­ly 50-year career, why Big Bird and Sesame Street have endured and what mar­keters should emu­late.

Here’s their take on how mar­keters can become mas­ter sto­ry­tellers and cre­ate time­less icons for their own brands.

1. Humor Is Vital

While Sesame Street is an edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram at its core, it is also fun­ny. And in play­ing Big Bird for 46 years, pup­peteer Car­oll Spin­ney said one of the great­est lessons he has learned is how use­ful humor can be.

“The intent was to edu­cate, but in using TV to edu­cate, we soon learned humor was impor­tant to make the show suc­cess­ful,” Spin­ney said. “It was just as impor­tant to be fun­ny as it was to be edu­ca­tion­al.”

Sim­i­lar­ly, when ads on TV are actu­al­ly fun and/or tell sto­ries, con­sumers don’t want to avoid them, Spin­ney said.

“Some are so short, [adver­tis­ers] just get the name through, but the key to some is to tell a sto­ry,” Spin­ney said. “Quite a lot can be said in 20 sec­onds.”

2. Be Human

Even though Big Bird is a tech­ni­cal­ly an ani­mal – but one Spin­ney described as “like my heart and soul” – he not­ed Big Bird actu­al­ly gets to be more human than the peo­ple on Sesame Street.

“He can express a lot of emo­tion,” Spin­ney said. “The only emo­tion Cook­ie Mon­ster has is he’s hun­gry, but Big Bird has the desire to be help­ful and he has ups and downs and a lot of emo­tion. Oscar [the Grouch] even cried his heart out one show. He res­cued a seag­ull with a bro­ken wing and it flew away and it broke his heart: ‘Why would he leave?’”

And there’s an impor­tant take­away here for brands and mas­cots as well.

Call­ing Big Bird “an age­less, time­less glob­al icon that has endured,” Dona­ton said the great­est les­son from this bird is sim­ply to be human. And one great exam­ple of an adver­tis­er that did just that is Coke with its 1979 spot fea­tur­ing for­mer Pitts­burgh Steel­ers defen­sive tack­le Mean Joe Greene, Dona­ton said. Like Big Bird, this is a some­what time­less ad with human emo­tion, show­cas­ing kind­ness in par­tic­u­lar, he added.

3. Human Cre­ativ­i­ty & Spon­tane­ity Still Mat­ter

Even though tech­no­log­i­cal advances in com­put­er gen­er­a­tion can result in won­der­ful spe­cial effects, Spin­ney said Big Bird has not been dig­i­tized – and Spin­ney still actu­al­ly wears a TV mon­i­tor strapped to his chest that he calls “the elec­tron­ic bra” in order to see what’s going on around him while he is in cos­tume — because pup­petry requires instant reac­tions that can­not be repli­cat­ed by non-humans. And, over the years, Spin­ney said he has honed his tech­nique so he knows how to make Big Bird por­tray a gamut of emo­tions and can instant­ly react to the scenes around him.

And, Dona­ton not­ed, even with won­der­ful writ­ers and scripts, it’s sim­i­lar­ly impor­tant for mar­keters to have the free­dom to ad lib on occa­sion.

4. Don’t Nec­es­sar­i­ly Shy Away From Con­tro­ver­sy

Sesame Street has tack­led seri­ous issues like racism and HIV, and even the death of shop­keep­er Mr. Hoop­er in 1982. Spin­ney said the episode in which Big Bird learns about death includ­ed a con­scious deci­sion to address the issue direct­ly rather than telling chil­dren Mr. Hoop­er moved to Flori­da.

Dona­ton not­ed con­tro­ver­sy is an area brands some­times shy away from. How­ev­er, seri­ous issues can also help mar­keters explore dif­fer­ent facets of human­i­ty and poten­tial­ly tell bet­ter sto­ries.

5. You Have To Have Pas­sion

Spin­ney said his pas­sion for his work for near­ly 50 years was “kind of built-in.”

“[Mup­pets cre­ator Jim Hen­son] asked me once, ‘How long do you want to do it?’ and I said, ‘Until I drop,’ and he said, ‘I’m glad to hear that. Maybe some­day we’ll be doing this in our mid-70s,’” Spin­ney said. “He died at only 53, which was heart­break­ing to us. But if he were alive now, he’d be pleased we made a sol­id improve­ment on edu­ca­tion. In most towns, you don’t have a kinder­gart­ner who hasn’t watched Sesame Street or they will be behind oth­er kids in the four-year-old group. We were high­ly crit­i­cized when we first start­ed – ‘That’s no way to teach,’ – but we did stuff in addi­tion to what edu­ca­tors and schools gave.”

And mar­keters that want to cre­ate char­ac­ters and sto­ries with sim­i­lar lega­cies will also have to tap into their own built-in pas­sion.

6. You Have To Exper­i­ment & Evolve

Spin­ney said the show began with the mind­set that it was an exper­i­ment in TV, which has endured over decades of change, includ­ing an audi­ence of chil­dren who have also changed from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. And that, in turn, has result­ed in adjust­ments in the char­ac­ters them­selves.

“Life has changed through those years. I think by being an exper­i­ment in TV, we can adjust to what it is now,” Spin­ney said. “I had no idea this was going to be it. I didn’t know what they were doing. We had to work at it. It’s a job in progress.”

7. Roll With The Punch­es

As Sesame Street pre­pares to move to HBO this fall, Spin­ney said he thinks it’s a mar­velous thing that allows the show to live on and actu­al­ly increase pro­duc­tion to 35 shows in its first year with its new net­work.

“We had to cut down the num­ber of new shows because there was not enough mon­ey to pro­duce shows,” Spin­ney said. “They final­ly said we had to cut down to 25 and we said, ‘We can’t do that – what let­ter of the day are we going to cut?’ So we did 26.”

What do you think is the most impor­tant les­son for brands from Big Bird?