Here we go, exactly one year later! 🙂
Last year, in February, I had written about the use of anthropomorphism as a creative device in advertising. Simply put, anthropomorphism is giving human form to things/objects. This works very well in advertising since most advertising involves brands selling us things/objects 🙂
In the last post, I listed ads where everything from margarine containers, lemonade bottles, furniture, sandals and shoes, shirt pockets, sofas, eggs, sandwiches, table lamps, vacuum cleaners, and even body parts (including feet, breasts, and testicles!) get some human form and talk!
At the end of this post, I had mentioned the difference between anthropomorphism and personification. Personification goes far beyond merely adding some kind of human form to objects and things. It can imagine even a feeling or sentiment as a human!
Let me start with an ad campaign that I had listed in the earlier post since it straddles both anthropomorphism and personification: Bonds underwear’s ‘Talking Testicles’ campaign by the agency Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, in 2016.
What happens in this campaign is that the man’s balls (testicles) are personified as 2 men. They talk to each other imbibing the characteristics of testicles and even have a chat with the brain (only heard) at times!
‘Balls as men’ is part anthropomorphism (as an idea) and part personification (the way it is executed here).
Let us up the ante, shall we?
An ad that is cited most often as the very best when it comes to personification is this early-2000s ad. If you do not recall seeing this ad, please watch it first, and then read the rest of this post:
Created for German energy company Epuron, working along with the German Ministry for the Environment, this ad was made by the German agency Nordpol Hamburg. It shows a man who says he is constantly misunderstood. When the big reveal happens in the end almost subtly without underlining the conceit specifically, it hits you like a strong gush of… wind 🙂
The beauty of this phenomenal ad is that it does not spoon-feed. In other words, it does not treat its viewers as children and instead assumes that they are smart enough to put things together themselves. In that sense, this is very much an interactive ad but not in the conventional sense we have come to understand interactive. The interaction in this ad happens between our brains and the ad!
A significant part of why this ad is so memorable beyond all the other reasons is the casting. The lead actor, Guillaume Delaunay, looks so unusual in every way that it helps us sink into the mystery the narrative is building up. If he looked like any other conventional bloke, I doubt the impact would have been this good.
Having talked about the very best ad in the personification space, let me list a few other solid ones, including 4 from India, before ending this post with my personal favorite (besides Epuron).
Take the Combiflam ad by Ogilvy in January 2019, for instance.
It shows a middle-aged man dancing his heart out, even as strong pain is shown as a huge man dancing behind him! But that’s not all 🙂 Behind the strong pain man, we see 2 more muscled men dancing! They happen to be dressed in blue and red, symbolizing icy and hot, the impact of the ingredients in Combiflam gel that helps alleviate strong pain! Pretty clever narrative device that makes it entertaining too!
A few months after the Combiflam ad, in May 2019, a subsidiary of Ogilvy, 82.5 Communications, personified chemicals in other hair dye products as harmful villains of the hair. The ‘Baalon ka Villain’ campaign has chemicals being personified by yesteryear villains like Shakti Kapoor and Ranjeet!
Then, Tata Tigor’s March 2020 ad campaign for the automatic variant makes masterful use of the personification narrative tactic. What do the ads personify? The accelerator, the brake, and the clutch! The ad campaign by WATconsult actually makes the clutch the ‘kabab main haddi’ (played by a man) playing spoilsport in the relationship between the accelerator and the brake (played by a man and a woman)! That’s really clever imagination of the automatic car’s innards and key selling point!
In June 2020, Ogilvy returned to the Combiflam series with another ad where a headache was personified as a tiny man dancing on top of a woman’s head 🙂
More recently, a new jewelry ad campaign that I thoroughly enjoyed uses personification to the hilt! Actor Nakuul Mehta plays Kisna diamond jewelry brilliantly in the December 2022 campaign.
The writing is super sharp here, in service of the personification! Besides the ‘heera’, ‘roshni’ wordplay, there’s a lot of implied meaning that makes the conversation so much more interesting. When Nakuul says (in the ad starring Stefy Patel), “And the world would say the boy earns lesser than you”, you realize only after the ad ends that it is a statement about the girl flaunting diamond jewelry she herself bought!
And in the other ad starring Tamanna Sharma, Nakuul says, “Saree… the world would say the girl is traditional”. When Tamanna asks back, ‘And what would you say?’, she implies how would the said piece of diamond jewelry elevate the saree she’s wearing! And the piece of jewelry responds based on what people would say/feel about the combination!
That brings me to the May 2021 ad by Apple, made by TBWA\Media Arts Lab.
The ad brilliantly personifies tracking given Apple’s privacy-first pitch. What simply happens inside our phones or digital devices is personified as a few people constantly shadowing the protagonist who finally uses an iPhone to pop them all out of existence!
Finally, let me share my personal favorite in terms of personification in advertising.
Watch this 2016 ad first to see if you can decipher what is being personified here.
The context is brilliant: periods are already referred to as ‘Aunt Flo’ in a few countries. So HelloFlo, the US-based feminine hygiene brand, takes that idea literally and personifies periods as an elderly black woman, for this content partnership with Kimberly-Clark’s Kotex (tampons) and Poise (period pads). The writing is incredibly nuanced, and hence fabulous! Aunt Flo is seen through the eyes of a couple freaking out that Aunt Flo is late, a girl waiting to see Aunt Flo for the first time, and a middle-aged woman who is farewelling Aunt Flo! The ending is fantastic too – Aunt Flo interrupts a couple when they are in the car getting ready for a romp 🙂
Except for one direct line, “Niagara Falls of blood coming from my vagina”, every other reference to periods is indirect and in sync with the personification narrative.
Adding the 2017 Japanese ad for … no, let me not spoil it for you 🙂 Just adding it here since the ad’s creative device fits this collection!