Mascots are back—but nostalgia is only part of the story. The most interesting characters now move between advertising, product interfaces, customer service and social culture. They do not merely make a brand friendlier; they make an abstract service easier to recognise, understand and remember.
We selected five cases with current public evidence and five clearly different jobs: Billie creates continuity, Oscar supports service, the monday.com Llama rewards progress, Bellboy owns the category and Notion’s AI face communicates through the interface. They are not identical kinds of mascots—and that is exactly the point. A character becomes valuable through its role and the system around it, not through a pair of eyes alone.
01 · bol. — Billie
Billie evolves, but the job stays recognisable.
bol created Billie in 2006 to give a large online store a human touch. In 2024, the familiar round employee became a compact blue character: simpler, more flexible and better able to adapt to different contexts. The redesign kept the smile, bol blue and a personality the company describes as enthusiastic, sympathetic, helpful, practical, reliable and confident.
In 2026, Billie gained a prominent role beside the new Boxie in bol’s ‘Effe bollen’ platform. Across two decades the form and channels have changed, while the underlying job has stayed recognisable. The lesson is continuity: refresh the visual grammar, not the reason people know the character.
A mascot becomes a brand asset when people recognise not only how it looks, but how it behaves.
02 · Oxxio — Oscar
Oscar has a job, not just a pose.
Oxxio translated Oscar into an expressive 3D character for a campaign system built around one promise: energy does not have to be complicated. The character gives an abstract service a recognisable face, but his role is not limited to advertising.
On Oxxio’s current website, Oscar is the digital assistant: available at any time for an immediate answer, without a queue. If he cannot resolve the question, the journey continues to a live-chat expert or callback. That connection between campaign face and service behaviour is powerful: the personality promises simplicity, while the interface has to deliver it.
03 · monday.com — the Llama
The product created the campaign hero.
The monday.com Llama did not begin as a spokesperson. In the current Llama Farm dashboard widget, every board item becomes one llama, its colour follows the status label and work completed on time keeps the animals happy and moving. It is a small, visible reward inside the product experience.
That behaviour gave the character permission to grow. In December 2024, singing CGI llamas led the ‘Love to Use’ campaign and turned a product joke into broad brand communication. Product delight came first; reach followed later.
04 · Hotels.com — Bellboy
Bellboy turns a category symbol into a specialist.
Hotels.com introduced Bellboy in April 2025 as an 18-inch anthropomorphic hotel desk bell—and called him a ‘spokesbell’. The object instantly signals the category, while the character acts like an insider who understands discounts, price alerts, loyalty and VIP benefits.
The 2026 ‘It’s All in the Name’ identity and Bellboy’s Super Summer Sale confirm that he is more than a one-off launch device. It is compact positioning: Bellboy needs no complicated origin story because his silhouette already answers the first question—what world does this brand know better than anyone else?
05 · Notion AI — the face informally called Nosy
Notion gives AI a state you can read.
Notion introduced its renewed AI experience in September 2024 with a small expressive face, internally and informally nicknamed Nosy. Notion art director Roman Muradov created the base character; BUCK and Notion evolved it into a Rive animation system whose eyebrows think and whose face can fall apart when something goes wrong.
The circular face remains an entry point to Notion AI, while Notion 3.0 expanded the experience into a personalised Agent. That makes the character less a traditional spokesperson and more a living piece of interface feedback: AI activity is normally invisible, but expression makes its presence and state easier to read.
The pattern
Character first, system second, job always.
Across these examples, recognisable design is only the entry point. Durable value appears when the character has a defined role, a repeatable way of behaving and enough governance to stay coherent wherever it appears.
- Ownable visual codes that still work at interface scale
- A defined personality and voice—not a collection of random jokes
- A useful recurring role in the customer or product journey
- A behaviour and expression library for consistent performance
- Clear ownership, boundaries and measurement across teams
The opportunity
The next mascot is an interface.
Generative AI makes this shift more urgent. A generic sparkle icon can announce intelligence, but it cannot build much memory or explain how a system behaves. An owned character can make knowledge, status and handoff legible—provided the experience behind it is trustworthy.
A face alone never creates trust. Approved knowledge, privacy, boundaries and a responsible route to a human remain essential. But when design and behaviour support the same promise, a mascot stops being decoration and starts becoming a useful brand interface.
References
Sources & further reading
- bol — About bol and Billie
- bol — Billie and Boxie in ‘Effe bollen’
- Truus — Oxxio’s 3D character system
- Oxxio — Oscar and human handoff
- monday.com — The Llama Farm widget
- monday.com — Press kit and campaign timeline
- Expedia Group — Bellboy checks in
- Expedia Group — Hotels.com’s 2026 identity
- Expedia Group — Bellboy’s 2026 Super Summer Sale
- Notion — September 2024 release
- Notion — Meet the new Notion AI
- BUCK — Notion AI character and animation
- Notion — Everything you can do with Notion AI
- Notion — Introducing Notion 3.0
