Highlighting the remarkable

Is it possible for a humble highlighter to become culturally relevant?

In 2018 (and again in 2021 and 2022), Stabilo, a brand of highlighters, broke through with a campaign called “Highlighting the Remarkable.”  The ads reproduced historic black & white photos in which women who were central to a story were partially obscured by more prominent men.  The ads show a Stabilo marker literally highlighting these women, with a short text blurb describing their significance.

The example above features NASA’s Katherine Johnson.  Another showed President Woodrow Wilson throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game, while his wife (who was the de facto president for a while after Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke) sits unobtrusively in the background. Another highlighted Lise Meitner, who discovered nuclear fission, standing behind her male collaborator who received a Nobel Prize.

This is how Stabilo highlighters are used – to highlight important stuff that you might otherwise overlook. This campaign gave that mundane functional benefit a unique emotional twist. The brand’s tweets generated 15 million impressions, interaction rates of 27 percent, and helped increase Stabilo’s mentions by 97%.

As the Twitter account @The_AdProfessor observes, “This ad combines iconic association, storytelling, AND shows the product in action.”

Marketers often take a heavy-handed or preachy tone when they attempt to tie their brand to an important cultural issue. Those efforts are usually ignored – and at worst they can backfire.

This campaign was not that way. It made an important statement about an issue that was (and still is) culturally relevant, did so in an offbeat way, and tied the message directly to the functional benefit of the product. ReMARKably clever and memorable.