Stabilo's 'The Real Shadowing' OOH campaign by Cazar DDB launched in the Dominican Republic in May 2017, using cast shadows to expose erased female figures in
Stabilo Turns a Highlighter Into a Statement on Female Erasure
Stabilo's 'The Real Shadowing' is a 2017 OOH campaign created by Cazar DDB in the Dominican Republic that uses the physical shadow cast by a Stabilo highlighter to reveal women who were erased or obscured from iconic historical photographs, turning a consumer durables product into a statement on gender inequality.
Published in the Dominican Republic in May 2017, the campaign carries a second title — 'Sombra Real' in Spanish — and was produced jointly by Cazar DDB República Dominicana and DDB Colombia. The campaign is classified under the Office Equipment and Consumer Durables categories, and its associated tag of gender equality signals that the creative ambition stretched well beyond shifting units of writing instruments. The Dominican Republic market provided the launch geography for what was conceived as a culturally resonant, internationally minded idea.
The campaign's mechanic is elegantly simple. A Stabilo highlighter is positioned against a well-known historical image in which a woman's presence has been minimised or entirely omitted. The shadow the marker casts falls precisely across the outline of that missing figure, effectively highlighting her without any additional graphic manipulation. In a single outdoor execution, the idea communicates product purpose — to make what matters visible — while simultaneously making an argument about whose contributions history chooses to illuminate. For Stabilo, a brand whose identity according to schwan-stabilo.com rests on innovation, quality, and internationality, the campaign translated those brand values into social currency.
The work entered a competitive landscape in which brands in the consumer durables and office equipment space were beginning to recognise that purpose-led creative could differentiate commodity products. In the Dominican Republic, a market where outdoor advertising remains a primary mass-reach medium, a single well-placed OOH execution carried the potential to generate both street-level impact and broader digital conversation. Clapboard assigns this campaign a score of 63 out of 100, reflecting a concept with genuine originality that is constrained by the scale of its single recorded media asset.
Stabilo built 'The Real Shadowing' on a consumer insight that is both culturally specific and universally legible. The insight is this: the act of highlighting — the core function of a Stabilo marker — is itself a political gesture when applied to figures that dominant narratives have chosen to obscure. In the Dominican Republic, where Out of Home advertising operates as a primary vehicle for brand messaging in urban centres, the choice of medium was not incidental. A physical billboard enacts the concept in real space, asking passersby to notice what has been made invisible, which mirrors the campaign's thematic argument with unusual precision.
The strategic framing connects Stabilo's product to a growing global conversation around gender equality and the recovery of women's contributions from historical record. This positioning placed the brand in a distinct creative register from its direct competitors in the writing-instruments segment. Brands such as Pilot and Pentel have historically competed in the office equipment and consumer durables space on functional claims — ink performance, grip comfort, longevity — leaving a gap for a brand willing to anchor its identity in cultural meaning. Stabilo, operating through Cazar DDB and DDB Colombia, moved into that gap with a concept that required no media spend beyond a single outdoor placement to articulate a complete brand philosophy.
The global writing and marking instruments market, which according to Grand View Research encompasses ballpoint and gel pens, markers, mechanical pencils, and art goods, was estimated at a growing scale by the early 2020s, though no reliable figure for the Dominican Republic market specifically in 2017 is publicly available from a named source. What is documented is that the campaign was submitted to major award shows with ambitions toward recognition at the Cannes Lions festival, indicating the agency and client believed the strategic idea was competitive at an international level. No verified award from Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards has been recorded for this campaign.
The creative execution of 'The Real Shadowing' depends entirely on photographic and typographic restraint. Production credits for the campaign are publicly documented and include a notable concentration of creative leadership across two agencies. Alfonso Diaz served as both chief creative officer and copywriter, while Leonardo Macias held the role of chief creative officer alongside art director duties, according to adsofbrands.net. Creative director Salvador Lister oversaw execution, with art direction handled by a three-person team comprising Leonardo Macias, Marcos Zorrilla, and Paola Cabrera, per the same source. Eduardo Dryer directed the work, with production carried out by Psquared Productions and Kokaleka Films. Executive account direction was managed by Amilcar Kalaf.
The visual grammar of the single recorded OOH asset relies on what is best described as a montage logic: a found historical photograph is paired with the physical object of the Stabilo highlighter, and the relationship between the two is resolved through the shadow the marker casts. The technique requires precise photographic staging — the angle of light, the distance of the marker from the image plane, and the cropping of the historical source material must all align for the reveal to read cleanly. That the idea works in a single frame, without explanatory copy beyond minimal branding, is a measure of the craft discipline applied by the Cazar DDB team in the Dominican Republic.
The montage approach also functions as a meta-commentary on the highlighter's product category. Office equipment advertising rarely claims aesthetic or moral authority. By treating the marker as both subject and instrument — the thing being advertised and the device through which meaning is made — the creative team collapsed the distance between product demonstration and cultural argument. The result is an execution that earns its place in the consumer durables category while refusing to be confined by it.
No verified performance data for 'The Real Shadowing' is publicly available from a named source. No sales lift figures, reach metrics, earned media valuations, or social amplification numbers have been documented in the public record for this campaign. Equally, no awards from Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or the WARC Awards have been verified for this work.
What can be assessed is the structural effectiveness of the campaign's design. A single OOH asset deployed in the Dominican Republic market carries an inherent reach ceiling relative to multi-market, multi-format campaigns. However, the concept is constructed for secondary circulation: an outdoor execution that generates social sharing and press coverage can multiply its reach far beyond its physical placement. The gender equality theme, the montage technique, and the connection to recoverable historical fact all increase the likelihood that the work would be reproduced and discussed in editorial contexts beyond paid media.
The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects this tension. The concept scores for originality and strategic coherence — the idea that a highlighter can perform the act of historical recovery is genuinely inventive — but the single-asset execution and the absence of documented impact data constrain the overall assessment. For brands operating in the consumer durables and office equipment segments, 'The Real Shadowing' stands as a structural template for purpose-led product advertising: conceptually ambitious, production-efficient, and built around a human truth that travels across cultural contexts without requiring translation.
'The Real Shadowing' is a 2017 OOH campaign by Stabilo, created by Cazar DDB in the Dominican Republic. It uses the shadow cast by a Stabilo highlighter to reveal women erased from historical photographs, connecting the product's core function to a gender equality argument in a single outdoor execution.
The campaign was created by Cazar DDB República Dominicana and DDB Colombia. Key credited individuals include chief creative officers Alfonso Diaz and Leonardo Macias, creative director Salvador Lister, and director Eduardo Dryer, with production by Psquared Productions and Kokaleka Films, according to adsofbrands.net.
Stabilo launched 'The Real Shadowing' in the Dominican Republic in May 2017. The campaign ran as an OOH outdoor execution, making it a market-specific initiative in the Dominican Republic that used physical out-of-home placement to deliver its gender equality message to a local audience.
No verified awards for 'The Real Shadowing' have been recorded. A search of Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, and the WARC Awards returns no documented wins or shortlist entries for this Stabilo campaign from Cazar DDB.
Clapboard assigns 'The Real Shadowing' a score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects a conceptually original idea built on strong strategic logic, moderated by the campaign's single recorded media asset and the absence of publicly verified performance or impact data from the Dominican Republic market.
The campaign turns a Stabilo highlighter's core function — making things visible — into a metaphor for historical erasure of women. Operating in the office equipment and consumer durables category, it uses the marker simultaneously as the product being advertised and as the creative instrument through which the campaign's meaning is constructed.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
