879 articles · page 11 of 19
TESCO | Food Love Stories | 2018
This is the comeback story of a British supermarket that won the Grand Prix in the Media category at Cannes Lions in 2018. A campaign that was supposed to talk about food quality ended up winning by telling stories about human connection instead.
IKEA | Lamp (Unböring campaign) | 2003
In 2002, a lamp got thrown out onto the street. Sitting there in the rain, staring through a window at the shiny new lamp that replaced it, the whole scene was so pitiful, so painfully human, that it tugged at anyone watching. Then a man with a Swedish accent stepped into frame and said one line that would end up carved into advertising history.
SKANDINAVISKA ENSKILDA BANKEN | THE PROPOSAL | 1973
Back in 1973, a bank commercial won the Grand Prix at Cannes. It's a work from over 50 years ago, but it makes me grateful to be living in an age where you can still watch it on YouTube.
SCOPE | SEE THE PERSON | 2011
In the darkness, rock music rings out. Then the lights come up on the members of a six-person band, Rudely Interrupted. The music tells you first, before anything else, that five of them are living with disability.
B3 STOCK EXCHANGE & UNITED NATIONS GLOBAL COMPACT | EART4 | 2023
Earth became a company. And one on the verge of bankruptcy, no less. At first I had no idea what that even meant. But it turns out this was the perfect "translation" for business leaders.
GUINNESS UDV | noitulovE | 2006
500 million years, rewound in 50 seconds. Three men have their first pint of Guinness in a pub. From there, we trace evolution backward.
NIKE+ | FuelBand | 2012
This isn't an ad. But an ad agency made it. That contradiction is exactly why it won two Grand Prix at Cannes.
森ビル | DESIGNING TOKYO | 2022
In two minutes and five seconds, it travels back through 58 years. From Nishi-Shimbashi in 1956 to Toranomon Hills in 2014, six Mori Building projects are stitched together as if in a single continuous shot. Sayoko Yamaguchi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takashi Murakami all drift onto the screen looking just as they did at the time. At some point you stop caring whether it's CG or real footage.
KENZO | MY MUTANT BRAIN | 2017
In this perfume commercial, a woman shoots laser beams out of her hands. And somehow it won a Titanium Lion at Cannes. Perfume ads finally broke.
DOCONOMY | DO BLACK | 2019
A credit card stops working. Not because you spent too much. Because you emitted too much CO2. A card like that actually exists.
CERVEZA SALTA | TOOTH IMPLANT | 2015
A rugby player loses a tooth during a match. It happens all the time. But this campaign actually implanted a 'tooth that doubles as a bottle opener' in place of the lost one. The surgery, the bottle-opening scene—it's all real. This project won a Titanium Lion at Cannes Lions 2015.
CITY OF CHICAGO | Boards of Change | 2020
In 2020, the plywood covering Chicago's streets was reborn as voting booths. The same boards used to cover broken windows became boxes that deliver votes. That shift alone makes this a powerful idea.
AXE “EXCITE” | Excite - Even Angels Will Fall | 2012
An angel descends from the sky. Beautiful angels in white robes and halos walk through a small town, and in front of one man, they smash their halos. "AXE can make even angels fall." This is the work that won the Grand Prix in the Creative Effectiveness category at Cannes Lions in 2012.
CANAL+ | THE BEAR | 2012
A bearskin rug lying on a living room floor becomes a Hollywood film director. It sounds ridiculous written out like that, but this became the most awarded ad in Gunn Report history in 2012.
GSK GLAXOSMITHKLINE | BREATH OF LIFE | 2019
Blow on your phone, and a tree painted in ink wash grows before your eyes. It's beautiful, but it's actually a lung function test. Only 7% of COPD cases in China get diagnosed. Turning a life-or-death health check into a piece of traditional art is a brilliant idea.
INDIAN RAILWAYS | Lucky Yatra | 2025
Fare-dodging was costing Indian Railways $800 million a year. Their answer wasn't tougher enforcement. It was turning tickets into lottery tickets.
BLINK TO SPEAK - | Blink To Speak | 2018
A language made for people who can only move their eyes. Even when ALS or a spinal injury takes away control of the rest of the body, the eyes keep moving until the very end. This gave those eyes words to speak with.
MICHELOB ULTRA | DREAMCASTER | 2023
Cameron Black was born blind, but he had one dream: to call an NBA game. Michelob Ultra spent a year making that dream actually come true.
COTY | FRENCH LESSON | 1978
This perfume ad for Coty L'Aimant won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1978. Released with the line "Do you speak L'Aimant?", the film feels like a mirror reflecting how the British saw the French—and how they saw the French language and the culture of perfume.
OLD TOWN ROAD FT. BILLY RAY CYRUS | Old Town Road (Official Movie) | 2020
A 20-year-old college dropout bought a beat for 30 dollars and wrote a song over it in a single day. That song was "Old Town Road." The official music video went on to win the Grand Prix in Entertainment Lions for Music at Cannes in 2021.
BURGER KING | XBOX KING GAMES | 2007
Burger King's agency made three Xbox games. They sold them for $3.99 as an add-on to value meals. They sold 3.2 million copies. The company's quarterly profit went up 40%. This is the story of an ad agency that made a product instead of an ad, and made the company money.
POLYCAM X UNESCO | BACKUP UKRAINE | 2022
In 2022, Russian bombing threatened to wipe out not just lives in Ukraine, but also the sculptures and churches that had watched over its cities for centuries. So creators from the ad industry came up with an idea: turn the smartphone everyone already owns into a tool for protecting cultural treasures.
WWF | THE ANT RALLY | 2013
Bugs staging a protest. That ridiculous idea won the Grand Prix at Cannes Lions.
ASB | MONEY GOES DIGITAL | 2007
In 2007, ASB, a bank in New Zealand, ran an ad in a place no one had ever seen one before: on banknotes themselves. The idea of sticking stickers onto real, circulating currency won the Grand Prix in the Media category at Cannes Lions.
DOVE | Real Beauty: How a Soap Brand Created a Global Self-Esteem Movement | 2025
An ad for soap has spent 20 years picking a fight with the definition of "beautiful." In 2025, it won three Grand Prix at Cannes. This isn't really an ad campaign anymore—it's bigger than that.
SIEMENS HEALTHINEERS | Magnetic Stories（The Flying Train） | 2024
The roar of an MRI machine—louder than a military jet—was transformed so kids would hear robots, flying trains, and spaceships instead. That's just not fair (in the best way).
L’OREAL | THE FINAL COPY OF ILON SPECHT | 2025
A 17-minute documentary that changes a life. Or, to be precise, it's an experience of watching a life that already *was* changed, forever. In 1971, a 23-year-old copywriter wrote four words that are still used around the world more than 50 years later. A film recording the words she spoke at the very end of her life just won the Grand Prix in the Film category at Cannes Lions 2025. This is a story about advertising. And it isn't. It's a story about a human being.
PARIS 2024 | Olympic Games Opening Ceremony | 2025
No stadium for the opening ceremony. Instead, the stage was 6 kilometers of the Seine River. On 7/26/2024, the athletes traveled down the river on 160 boats. 300,000 people stood along the banks, and 1.5 billion were watching on TV.
TESCO RETAIL | Subway Virtual Store | 2011
If you can't win on number of stores, just stop trying to add more. Instead, turn an entire subway platform into a supermarket. Scan a QR code and your shopping is done—by the time you get home, your groceries are already there. In 2011, this idea out of South Korea got the whole world talking.
UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON | UNHATE | 2012
Obama and Hu Jintao. Netanyahu and Abbas. The Pope and an imam, kissing. The moment these posters went up in cities, the world reacted. Within hours the Vatican was furious, calling it a "grave lack of respect," and the poster of the Pope was taken down. That reaction was probably part of the plan all along.
THE NEW ZEALAND HERPES FOUNDATION | THE BEST PLACE TO HAVE HERPES | 2025
A former All Blacks coach says it with total sincerity: sheep numbers are down, meat pies are pricier, and the only way left to restore the country's pride is to become number one in the world at herpes. By the time this thing picked up two Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, it was official — this story is not sane.
NIKE | Nothing Beats a Londoner | 2018
Skepta shows up on screen, gets roasted by a kid, and walks off. The real stars aren't famous athletes — they're 258 unknown young people grinding it out on London's streets.
British Airways | 2024
No logo. No text. No QR code. British Airways' outdoor ad "Windows" doesn't show the view from the plane window—it shows only the faces of passengers looking at that view.
Pedigree | 2024
Turning dim, dingy shelter photos into images that look like professional studio shots, with a little help from AI. Pedigree's "Adoptable," created by Colenso BBDO in New Zealand, won the Grand Prix in the Outdoor category at Cannes Lions 2024.
NIKE | BREAKING2 | 2018
Breaking two hours in the marathon. For that single goal, Nike spent three years. On May 6, 2017, three of the world's fastest runners gathered at an F1 racetrack in Italy.
WARNER MUSIC GROUP | SAYLISTS | 2020
One in twelve children has a speech sound disorder (SSD). The key to therapy is repetition — but for kids, that's just plain boring. So what about music? Or rather, isn't music itself the ultimate form of repetition? Starting from that simple question, Warner Music and ad agency Rothco used an algorithm to analyze a 70-million-song Apple Music catalog and created "Saylists," playlists with genuine therapeutic value.
DIESEL | FRANCESCA | 2020
This film, released for Pride Month 2020, has you watching what looks like a transgender story—until the very end, when it pulls the rug out from under you. She takes off her DIESEL denim and puts on a nun's habit.
Nikka Whisky | No Labels | 2025
They peeled the labels off the bottles. And they peeled the assumptions off people, too. That's the moment whisky became a way of living.
Vaseline | Vaseline Verified | 2025
A project that took all 3.5 million ways people use Vaseline on social media and tested every single one in a lab. The first time Vaseline has done anything like this in 155 years, and it won a Titanium Lion at Cannes.
Nike | So Win | 2025
After 27 years away, Nike returned to Super Bowl advertising, and this time it lined up some of today's top women athletes: Caitlin Clark, Sha'Carri Richardson, A'ja Wilson, and more. The line: "You can't win. So win."
PENN ATHLETIC PRODUCTS | BOUNCE TEST | 1989
In 1989, Minneapolis agency Fallon McElligott unleashed a 30-second spot on the world. To prove the "consistency of bounce" of a racquetball, it wasn't just balls getting dropped from a building.
AnNahar (Lebanon newspaper) | Active Journalism | 2025
Lebanon is a country that failed to choose a president 14 times in two years. So a long-established newspaper took action. It put forward an AI, trained on 90 years of its own articles, as a presidential candidate.
Battleground Mobile India | The Great In-Game Wedding | 2025
Meet in the game, marry in the game. On BGMI's battleground Pochinki, a couple held a real three-day Indian wedding, complete with Mehendi, Sangeet and Phere. Two hundred million people watched what became "India's Biggest In-Game Wedding."
TRA Mongkut Fertilizer | Soil Stay | 2026
A sample of soil, handed over as payment for a place to stay. That's the idea behind this farmstay program for farmers, created by Thai fertilizer brand TRA Mongkut and VML, which won the Grand Prix at Spikes Asia 2026.
Duolingo | Duo's Death / Revive Duo | 2025
On February 11, 2025, Duolingo's green owl died. X's for eyes, tongue lolling out. Normally, killing off your own mascot would be a PR disaster. But this was actually the start of a "resurrection" that racked up 1.7 billion impressions.
COCA COLA | A Rainbow for the Rainbow Nation | 2014
In 2014, South Africa marked 20 years since the end of apartheid. Coca-Cola made a rainbow. Not as a figure of speech — they made an actual rainbow appear in the sky over Johannesburg.
SONY | GRAVITY CAT | 2017
A cat walks on walls, runs across the ceiling, and two sisters fall into the sky along with their entire apartment. For four straight minutes, I just kept asking myself, "Is this really not CGI?"
Chicago Deaf Society | Caption with Intention | 2025
From 1971 to 2025, captions were always white. Nobody ever questioned it. Learning this story, I felt ashamed of my own lazy thinking.