Veteran cartoonist Sergio Aragones is best known for his work for Mad Magazine where his cartoons have appeared in more than 400 issues over a span of nearly 50 years. During his prolific career he created a popular series called The Shadow Knows, that showed all kinds of ordinary characters in all sorts of everyday situations, with their shadows behind them revealing their true thoughts or motivations.
I’ve used this concept often when creating an ad campaign or promotion. The principle is simple: Communication is most effective when you address the individual as they see themselves, never as they appear to others. Demographic statistics can get in the way of this because sterile numbers don’t always translate well into the essence of human behavior.
This is why marketing creative is such an important component of the advertising process. Any marketing strategy must communicate on a personal level, something a person considers meaningful and important. That requires an intuitive and subjective level of human understanding and an ability to think visually in a way that grabs your audience. This is the turf of the marketing creative.
Although radio and comic book character Lamont Cranston used his psychic abilities to fight crime, he may have excelled just as well in the ad business. In which case we would have had a slightly different American idiom: “Who knows what buying behavior lurks in the hearts of men and women? The Shadow knows!”