 Here at Copel Communications, we do a lot of writing. But a picture is still worth a thousand words. We craft a lot of creative concepts, too, involving visuals, which are typically handed off to talented artists and designers.
This is where visual metaphors often come into play, and we love them. So much so that we’re devoting this article to them. Show me a story A metaphor is really a verbal construct. It’s when one word is used as a symbol for something else. (“Love is a rose.”) Again, words. If you look up “metaphor” in your thesaurus, you’ll get some decidedly “verbal” synonyms, such as “figure of speech,” “word painting,” and “word picture.” Whatever. More interesting is how you, as a creative professional, can use a metaphor visually. Where one thing stands in for something else. Or how you can be “literal” with your visuals, combining or juxtaposing elements that, in the real world, would never be combined or juxtaposed. Yet when you force that combination upon the viewer, bang, there’s synergy. (If you do it right, of course.) And that’s stuff that we love (again, when it’s done right). Put it in its place We developed creative campaigns for a company that served a large community. They were a private concern, yet funded by taxpayer dollars, providing an essential service. (That’s as much as we can divulge safely here.) We were tasked with creating a pride/public awareness campaign for them. So the thinking went like this:
Thus the campaign. You certainly think of those trucks as they drive through your neighborhood. But did you know that this company also does outreach to local schools? That it serves wealthy and poorer neighborhoods alike? So what if you saw those familiar trucks... in unfamiliar settings? Mind you, the truck is branded with the company’s logo; it’s unmistakable. So what if you saw it, parked... inside a kindergarten classroom? Atop a wealthy lawn in an affluent neighborhood? At the park? The images would be (purposely) jarring... at first. But then, within seconds, they’d make sense. “Oh, of course,” you’d think. “(Company) is part of the landscape. Part of the community.” It’s hard to connect them so inseparably with words. With images, it’s instant. It’s visceral. We did another creative campaign for this same client, along similar lines. What, we asked, are the essential elements that everyone needs? The answers are easy: Air, water, food, life, safety, security, and so on. So what if you depicted a visual/iconographic matrix of those elements... and simply added (Company) into the mix? You’re forcing the viewer to make the connection. Personification Personification represents an entire subset of visual metaphors. We worked on a creative campaign for a regional cancer center, in which the visual metaphor was arrestingly simple: We opted to personify cancer. The reasoning went like this: People are afraid of cancer. But what if cancer were afraid of (Regional Cancer Center)? That’s an interesting spin. Of course, you can’t see cancer. Not in real life. But in Ad Land, you can. Because you can personify it. The same way that Allstate famously personified “Mayhem” with its character who loves to trash your home and your car (underscoring your need for the services of Allstate). Cancer is a serious subject. You don’t want some cutesy actor portraying it. So you could just have a menacing pair of eyes... a shadow... just enough to walk the line between seen and unseen. A deep well We love visual metaphors because opportunities to employ them always crop up sooner or later. And there are always new ways to use them, to get creative, to make something that’s at once visually arresting and on-message. Need help with this kind of creative concepting? Contact us. We’d love to tackle that assignment for you.
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