876 articles · page 4 of 19
JOHN LEWIS | The Bear and the Hare | 2015
A bear who sleeps through winter had never once seen Christmas. So his best friend, a hare, gives him an alarm clock so he won't miss it—a story told in just two minutes.
REEBOK | Escape The Sofa | 2002
A man stands up to go exercise, and his sofa attacks him. That's the whole story — and it won gold at Cannes.
SMART FORTWO | OFFROAD | 2013
A tiny car takes a spectacular tumble off-road. Instead of hiding what's normally seen as a flaw, this ad shows it off proudly, then drops one line at the end: "SMART is as useless off-road as an SUV is in the city." That shameless confidence is just great.
HEWLET-PACKARD | THE NATIONAL GALLERY GRAND TOUR | 2008
Instead of waiting for people to come to it, the museum sent its paintings out into the city. It's a simple idea, but nobody had done it before HP and the National Gallery did.
BATCHELORS | ODE TO A PEA | 1990
A white plate. One single pea. A violin swells as a poetic voice intones, "Oh pea, perfect sphere of jade, why do you torment me with your beauty?" Britain, 1990.
MINI | MINI DOMINATRIX | 2006
Winter in Canada, 2006. Anyone who visited MINI's website was greeted by a dominatrix in leather. Click on each part of the car, and she'd "discipline" the MINI with a whip or a paddle while explaining its winter safety features. Kinky, bold, and impossible to forget.
NIKE | I AM PLAYR | 2012
There's a game where you live a footballer's life in the first person. Nike was woven into that story as if it were simply part of life — and over 400,000 pairs of boots got sold inside the game. It never feels like advertising, but that's exactly what it is.
THE TOPSY FOUNDATION | SELINAH | 2010
Just playing the footage in reverse, that's it. But when I heard they kept the camera rolling every single day for 90 days to make that work, I was speechless.
カネボウ化粧品 | I HOPE.希望の美容液／I HOPE.希望 | 2025
It's a commercial for a serum, but it barely talks about skin at all. This is the 2025 chapter of the "hope" story that KANEBO has been telling for years.
ADIDAS | Original Forever | 2026
The Gallagher brothers, who hadn't appeared together in more than ten years, showed up side by side on screen. What made it happen wasn't even the news that the band was reforming—it was an adidas ad.
HEINEKEN | THE PUB THAT REFUSED TO DIE | 2026
In a small village in Ireland, the only pub in town was about to close. Instead of shooting a commercial about it, Heineken went and actually saved the place.
MOVISTAR | THIS IS NOT A GAME | 2024
The person on the other side of the screen might not be a friend. A video that looks like a kids' game walkthrough but keeps telling a horrifying story the whole time.
RAINBOW LOBSTER MEXICO | 600K Network | 2026
600,000 people scanned a QR code with their phones and exposed fraud in a presidential election. This wasn't really an ad—it was a tool for revolution.
HYUNDAI | COQUÍ ALARMED | 2026
Puerto Rico's car theft alarm sound turned out to be the call of the island's beloved frog. Once people realized it had been quietly borrowed, they were not happy about it.
CARITAS | VEHICLE OF HOPE | 2026
They turned the Pope's official car into a mobile clinic for children in Gaza. And it took not one but two popes to say yes. Has any other ad ever cast actual popes—plural—in its campaign?
NIKE | ANGRY CHICKEN | 2003
A young man, chased by an angry chicken, jumps, climbs, and scrambles his way across an entire city. The whole thing is shot like a nature documentary, narrated entirely in French. The setup is completely absurd, but every single move is real.
MATSUSHITA ELECTRIC INDUSTRIAL CO | HAVE A CIGARETTE | 1975
This is a piece that Dentsu and Matsushita Electric made together in 1975. Half a century later, this piece of work still has its name left in the archives. Just from the title, you honestly have no idea what kind of ad this even is.
EMPRESA FOLHA DA MANHA | Points of View (HITLER) | 1989
At first, all you see on screen is a scatter of dots. But as the camera pulls back, those dots come together into the face of Hitler. A newspaper built this trick to make one point: if you only look up close, you'll get the whole picture wrong.
METROPOLE ORKEST | METROPOLE TWEETPHONY | 2013
A Dutch orchestra on the verge of disappearing due to budget cuts had a full 52-piece orchestra perform a song live that was composed entirely on Twitter. You didn't need an instrument, just 140 characters.
STOCKHOLM PRIDE | LOS SANTOS PRIDE | 2017
They put a pride parade into the world of GTA5 that absolutely cannot be destroyed. In a city where you're allowed to run over pedestrians and shoot criminals, they made the one thing you can't attack—and thinking about what that means gives you chills.
BOONEOAKLEY | BOONEOAKLEY WEBSITE | 2010
There's an agency that built its company website without a single page of its own. BooneOakley put together its entire site using nothing but YouTube videos.
TOYOTA | BUGGER | 1999
Small accidents keep happening out on the farm, one after another, and each time someone - or even a dog - just mutters the word "bugger." That's the entire commercial. And yet, before it even aired, it had the client genuinely terrified.
TOYOTA PRIUS | PRIUS GOES PLURAL | 2011
If there are more Priuses on the road, what do you call them? That question alone became an entire campaign. The answer wasn't found in the car—it was found in grammar.
MATES HEALTHCARE | Chemist | 1988
A young man walks into a pharmacy trying to hide his face, and asks in a shaky voice, "Excuse me, how much is this?" — pointing at a condom. The trick is that what he really wants to say, but can't say out loud, spills out as subtitles on screen.
PUBLIC HEALTH OF FENGXIAN | THE 70-METER SPIT | 2011
Spitting. Just that one act sends germs flying 70 meters on the wind. It's a fact so ordinary in China that nobody ever gave it a second thought—until a single wall made it impossible to ignore.
POPEYES | THAT LOOK FROM POPEYES | 2020
A few days after Beyoncé's new apparel line sold out instantly, fans online were buzzing about one thing: "wait, this looks just like Popeyes' uniform." Popeyes took that and sold the real thing, exactly as it was, on their own online store.
HBO | Imagine | 2010
A mystery about a teddy bear plays out on a giant cube-shaped screen on a street corner, showing four different angles at once. One truth starts to look like entirely different stories, just depending on where you're standing.
PETRONAS | TAN HONG MING IN LOVE | 2008
A seven-year-old boy who wasn't even supposed to be the subject of the shoot ended up winning Malaysia's first-ever Gold Lion at Cannes. No script, none at all.
TOYOTA | REAL DEALERS CAN'T JUMP | 2000
In 2000, this Toyota dealer ad won Gold at Cannes. Just from the title, you get the feeling there's another twist waiting for you.
7-ELEVEN | KWIK-E-MART | 2008
A real convenience store disguised as a fake convenience store from a cartoon. And not just one store, but twelve. And done in a single night. The side that had been mocked by The Simpsons as a symbol of unhealthy eating put on that insult like a full costume and wore it proudly.
MTV NETWORKS | Jukka Bros | 2000
Four brothers live deep in the woods, and the older ones show no mercy to their uncool little brother. The punishment tool is a ping pong paddle, and what gets pressed into him is the MTV logo. The punishment itself becomes the ad.
SANDOZ DEUTSCHLAND | OTTER | 2024
The radio ad "OTTER" was written by two interns who hadn't even gotten used to their business cards yet. And the subject matter? Poop jokes. Somehow it won a Gold Lion at Cannes.
NHK | COTO-TAMA | 2009
Just the title, COTO-TAMA, already hints at some kind of wordplay. This is a 2009 piece for NHK made by Hakuhodo. It's about little clusters of words rolling across a computer desktop, eventually making their way onto the wall of a building at a live event.
GUARANÁ ANTARCTICA | STUCK IN THE 80S | 2022
The winning prize money at the 2019 Women's World Cup was actually on par with what men's tournaments paid out back in the 1980s. To make that one fact impossible to ignore, this campaign took over the entire stage of the Tokyo Olympics.
BAND-AID | MAGIC VISION | 2012
The instant a kid starts to cry from a scrape, Kermit pops up right on the Band-Aid and starts singing. Just hold up your phone, and an ordinary bandage turns into a tiny stage.
MCDONALD’S | Camera Rolls: Gig, Wedding, Bowling | 2026
What's in this ad is literally the contents of someone's phone. Whether it's a gig, a wedding, or bowling, keep scrolling and you'll always end up at McDonald's.
RENAULT | UN.PATENT | 2025
Renault opened up its patent for extinguishing electric vehicle fires for free, even to rival manufacturers. Instead of locking the technology away, as companies usually do, they let the whole thing go.
OLD SPICE | SMELLCOME TO MANHOOD (MOM'S SONG) | 2016
A mother hiding outside her son's bedroom door, secretly singing to herself — that image alone is unsettling. Once their sons start using Old Spice, they suddenly become magnets for girls, and the mothers sing about it together, looking almost heartbroken.
FAIRPHONE | The World's First Modular Smartphone (Fairphone 2) | 2017
A phone whose screen pops off in 20 seconds, no tools needed. In an industry where keeping a phone's insides a black box was the norm, Fairphone chose to show everything on purpose.
MASTERCARD | ABRACADABRA: FROM FAN TO FEATURED | 2025
Mastercard turned the music video for Lady Gaga's first new single in five years into the world's biggest audition. The star of the show wasn't Gaga — it was her fans.
MUMBAI POLICE | THE PUNISHING SIGNAL | 2020
The more you honk, the longer the light stays red. Mumbai, one of the noisiest cities in the world, built a traffic signal that punishes honking itself.
BUD LIGHT | GREETING CARDS(Bud Light Institute) | 2003
The text on these greeting cards is just completely ridiculous. But what's great is that it commits to that ridiculousness all the way through.
AUTISM SOCIETY | Language of Bedwetting | 2026
There was no word to explain bedwetting in any AAC app in the world. Noticing this gap, this campaign went ahead and built an entirely new "language" out of more than 100 symbols.
CIVIC | Everyday | 2004
In 2003, Honda poured about 600 million yen into a single campaign, running three commercials at once. "Everyday" was the youngest of those three siblings.
NEW ZEALAND BOOK COUNCIL | GOING WEST | 2010
Just by cutting paper, a forest rises and a river starts to flow. No CGI, no compositing — a "book that truly moves," made entirely by hand over eight months.
TOYOTA | BACKSEAT DRIVER | 2012
A kid in the backseat who used to just whine "are we there yet?" now grips their own steering wheel inside an iPhone app that's linked by GPS to the real car. Boring travel time spent just tracing a parent's driving got turned into a whole game.
江崎グリコ | Smile.Glico みんなとハグハグ篇 | 2016
A character called Hug Hug goes around hugging people all over the world. Watching the smiles spread from person to person, you can feel something inside you loosen up.
headspace | Reword | 2017
A red strikethrough appears before you hit send. Type something cruel, and it asks, "Are you sure you want to send that?" It's basically spellcheck for bullying. The mechanism is simple, and the aim is dead straight.