Stabilo: Highlight The Remarkable
Stabilo wanted to revitalize its brand and connect with a modern audience by moving beyond functional office utility. DDB Dusseldorf was tasked with finding a way to make the Stabilo Boss highlighter relevant within contemporary social conversations, specifically targeting a younger, socially conscious demographic that values gender equality and historical truth.
Creative Idea
Used yellow highlighter strokes on historical photos to reveal women airbrushed from history.
Stabilo used its iconic yellow highlighter to literally and figuratively highlight remarkable women hidden in the background of famous historical photographs, turning a simple office tool into a powerful symbol for gender equality and historical revisionism.
How a Yellow Stroke Outshone Silicon Valley
The Power of 27 Percent Engagement
While most digital campaigns struggle to break through the noise, Stabilo achieved a staggering 27% interaction rate on social platforms. The campaign’s organic reach was propelled by a single tweet from designer Daniel Benneworth-Gray, which generated 50,000 retweets and 92,000 likes in just 48 hours. This "Daniel Effect" transformed a regional German print execution into a global phenomenon, eventually reaching over 15 million impressions on Twitter alone. Brand sentiment for Stabilo spiked by 97.4%, proving that a static, analogue medium could dominate the digital era.
Resurrecting the Hidden Figures
The creative team, led by Senior Art Director Vera Ickert and Senior Copywriter Teresa Berude, meticulously sourced high-resolution historical photographs where women were physically present but visually obscured by their male peers. The "talent" featured included NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, US First Lady Edith Wilson, and physicist Lise Meitner. A second phase of the campaign later highlighted Hedy Lamarr, the actress who co-invented frequency-hopping technology. To maintain authenticity, the yellow highlighter mark was digitally rendered to perfectly mimic the texture, transparency, and "bleed" of a real Stabilo Boss pen on paper.
Classroom Impact and Modest Victories
The campaign’s cultural footprint extended beyond advertising, as teachers worldwide began using the ads as educational tools to discuss "hidden" history. At the Cannes Lions, the campaign became a "modest winner" story - a stationery brand with a limited media buy managed to outperform tech giants like Apple and Microsoft for top honors. As Ickert noted, the strategy was simple: find a socially relevant topic bigger than the product, and let the product do what it does best.
Creative Strategy Deconstructed
Company
A globally recognized highlighter pen whose primary function is to make specific information stand out from a crowded page.
Category
Stationery brands typically focus on functional utility, school supplies, or office productivity rather than tackling major social issues.
Customer
People who care about gender equality and feel that traditional history books often overlook the vital contributions of women.
Culture
The 2018 cultural zeitgeist was heavily focused on the #MeToo movement and the broader push for female representation.
Company
A globally recognized highlighter pen whose primary function is to make specific information stand out from a crowded page.
Category
Stationery brands typically focus on functional utility, school supplies, or office productivity rather than tackling major social issues.
Strategy:
Repurpose a functional product benefit as a symbolic tool for correcting systemic cultural and historical oversights.
Customer
People who care about gender equality and feel that traditional history books often overlook the vital contributions of women.
Culture
The 2018 cultural zeitgeist was heavily focused on the #MeToo movement and the broader push for female representation.
Strategy:
Repurpose a functional product benefit as a symbolic tool for correcting systemic cultural and historical oversights.
Results
The campaign achieved significant global reach and engagement. It generated 15.6 million impressions on Twitter alone. The conversation was sustained with an average of 4,100 mentions each day. The campaign went viral, being shared and discussed across major media outlets like Adweek, The Drum, and Neon. It inspired a user-generated content movement where people proposed and highlighted other remarkable women from history, effectively shifting the narrative around gender equality in historical achievements.
15.6M
Twitter impressions
4,100
daily mentions
Global
media coverage
Strategy Technique
Make the Invisible Visible
It identifies a cultural blind spot - the erasure of women from history - and uses the product as the literal tool to correct that narrative in a visually arresting way.
Explore Technique
Creative Technique
Spotlight the Overlooked
The campaign uses the product's primary function to visually isolate and celebrate women who were physically present in historical moments but historically ignored, making the invisible visible through a simple yellow stroke.
Explore Technique
Craft Breakdown
The campaign's brilliance lies in its perfect alignment of product utility (highlighting) with a powerful social message, executed through minimalist art direction.
The use of a single yellow stroke against black-and-white photography is a masterclass in visual focus and brand integration.
The tagline 'Highlight the remarkable' is a perfect double entendre that links the product function to the social cause.
The selection of specific historical photos where women were physically present but visually ignored is crucial to the campaign's impact.
The clean, minimalist layout of the print ads allows the historical imagery and the highlighter mark to do the heavy lifting.
The synergy between the product's literal function and the metaphorical 'highlighting' of history creates a seamless brand message.
