FEATURE
From a university for taxi drivers to a sidewalk you can read with a cane
Advertising usually points to something that already exists. But sometimes, when there's nothing out there to point to, a company just goes ahead and builds it themselves. In Colombia, Chevrolet teamed up with the vocational training body SENA to launch a free university that taxi drivers could actually attend, while TIGO-UNE, also in Colombia, turned street-corner payphones into savings deposit points. Boost Mobile made its phone shops into official polling places on election day, and Telenor replaced a birth registration process that used to take three days with an app that finishes the job in ten minutes. What's left behind tends to stick around, too. The washing machines Whirlpool placed in schools spread from 17 schools to 154, and SOL CEMENT released the design and patent for its sidewalk tiles to the public, completely free. The featured ads are arranged in chronological order. Starting with that university for taxi drivers in 2011 and ending with sidewalks in Lima in 2024, this lineup spans 13 years.
6 articles
CHEVROLET | 2011
There are moments when an ad stops being an ad. This campaign is exactly that. Chevrolet in Colombia built a real university for taxi drivers.
WHIRLPOOL | 2017
In America, one in five children don't have access to clean clothes. That alone makes them miss school more often, putting them at seven times the risk of dropping out. What Whirlpool did was put washing machines in schools. That's it.
TIGO-UNE | 2017
In Colombia, 8 million people don't have a bank account. Living on $3.5 a day, all they can do is hide their coins at home. In that country, TIGO-UNE turned payphones into banks, just as they were. The Grand Prix in Product Design wasn't given out for nothing.
BOOST MOBILE | 2017
During the 2016 US presidential election, a Boost Mobile phone store became an actual polling place. It was the first time ever that a private company's store became an official polling location. The campaign was serious enough, in a not-even-a-little-funny way, that it won multiple Grand Prix at Cannes.
TELENOR | 2020
In Pakistan, 60 million children had no birth certificate. Without one, they couldn't get medical care or go to school — children the country essentially didn't recognize as existing. What changed that was an app that took just 10 minutes to use. At the 2021 Cannes Lions, it won Grand Prix in two categories, a first for Pakistan.
SOL CEMENT | 2024
This is what happened when a cement company thought hard about what cement could actually do. Tap your cane on the ground, and the number of lines carved into the tile tells you what's there: "this is a bank," "this is a pharmacy." Two lines mean a bank, three mean a grocery store, four mean a pharmacy. Laid across the streets of Lima, Peru, it lets blind people walk the city on their own.
Fictional People Started Working
Five people who don't exist — and reality answered back anyway.
Ads That Reached Into the Law
Breaking rules, slipping through loopholes, rewriting statutes — eight ads, ordered by how far they reached.
Alone, You Can't Reach It
An ad that isn't finished until one more person shows up.
What Was Already There Became the Medium
From chalk to banknotes: 11 media nobody had to buy
The Product Is Nowhere to Be Seen
How choosing not to show became the boldest statement of all
Putting 'We're Broke' Right at the Center of the Idea
Six ads that turned a shortfall into the raw material itself