Cashing in on personification

​Some concepts are hard to convey. If you toil in the creative trenches, you can be tasked with presenting (and thus selling) ideas like love, or comfort, or peace of mind. Similarly, you might need to depict something malicious that can’t be seen: a disease. Or you might need an entirely new visual spin on something that’s pretty mundane and familiar, such as, say, a desktop computer.
 
There’s a common go-to solution for all of these creative dilemmas: Personification. It’s a term you learned in fourth-grade English class to explain how an author used it to bring something like a natural force (fire, thunderstorm) to life in the reader’s mind. It’s a literary device that’s been around forever; think of how “Awful Beauty puts on all its arms” in Pope’s “The Rape of The Lock.” And that was in 1712.
 
But we digress. 
 
Sure, you can employ personification in the written form, in copy. But copy requires “diving in” on the part of the audience; it’s not immediately apparent. Aside from, perhaps, a headline, it doesn’t grab the way visual elements do. 
 
What looks like a person?
 
There are plenty of great examples here, both from our own experience and from well-known campaigns. We’ll start with the former, and work our way to the latter. 
 
In case you’re not up on your latest enterprise technology, there’s a hot new thing out there called robotic process automation which, despite its cool name, is basically just a souped-up computer macro that spans more applications than just, say, Excel. 
 
We had a client that was able to use this tech to actually pull information from corporate directories and Excel sheets, and then draw a process map from it in Microsoft Visio. That’s really impressive. But how do you market it? 
 
In this case, it was personification—and more specifically, anthropomorphism—to the rescue. Our graphic designer on this project created an adorable character of a cartoon “artist” robot, replete with paintbrush, smock, and beret. You see the bot holding the paintbrush, you see the gorgeous process map he’d created, sitting on its little cartoon easel... the thing barely even needs a headline. 
 
Another: We were working with a hospital client, and they wanted to promote their new cancer-treatment center. And one of the campaign concepts we presented to them personified cancer.
 
Granted, this is a delicate subject. You don’t want the over-the-top monstrous allergen you may have seen in TV ads for antihistamines. So cancer could be depicted as a malicious, lurking presence. Perhaps just a pair of eyes, spying for an evil opportunity. Or it could be there, without even being shown, borrowing from the style of classic horror movies by Val Lewton such as “Cat People.” 
 
Going big
 
Two of the best examples of personification that come to mind are from national TV campaigns: one old, the other still ongoing. 
 
The old one was for what we’d mentioned in the intro: “something that’s pretty mundane and familiar, such as, say, a desktop computer.” Depicting a gray box isn’t very exciting; it’s what you can do with it that makes it exciting. Or, conversely, what it can’t do (if it’s not such a great computer) that makes it frustrating and annoying. 
 
Remember “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC.”? If you don’t, these were ads from Apple, aiming to show the superiority of their computers over Windows-based machines. And the brilliant thing about them was that they never showed a computer at all. There were simply two actors standing on an empty white stage. One—the hip, cool dude portrayed by Justin Long—was the Mac. The other—the pitifully unhip office wonk, portrayed by John Hodgman—was the PC. The Mac talked about, and showed, all the cool things he could do. The PC tried to do the same, and always failed, in an embarrassingly humorous way. Apple sold a lot of Macs off this campaign. 
 
The other campaign that really nails “personification” is from Allstate. You’ve just got to love their “Mayhem” character. Think about that, and how perfectly that works: A single actor, a person, portraying all the terrible things, both human-induced and acts of nature, that can screw up your life and your belongings. You don’t think of all these random evils as one single force... until you see those ads. And then you see him positioned up against Allstate, and the brand gets cemented in your mind. 
 
When to use it, or not
 
Personification, like any creative trope, is no magic bullet. It’s certainly not new. And as we’d mentioned above in our cancer-center story, you need to be careful in how you employ it; used flippantly or indelicately, it can backfire on you. 
 
But done right, personification is a great tool, just waiting for fresh new applications. Need help with it, or any creative challenge? Contact us. We’d love to help. 

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