Country
113 articles
Harvey Nichols | Sorry I Spent It On Myself | 2013
At Christmas 2013, the upscale department store Harvey Nichols came right out and said, "Sorry, I spent it on myself." It was an ad that threw the whole idea of Christmas being a season of sharing straight out the window.
BRITISH HEART FOUNDATION | HARD, FAST & EFFECTIVE | 2013
People who watched this ad ended up saving 28 lives. An ad whose success gets measured not by awareness or likability, but by "how many people came back from the dead" — that's not something you see every day.
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.
GOOGLE | Voice Search | 2012
In 2012, more than 150 oddly spelled billboards popped up on the streets of London. Outside subway stations, mysterious strings of letters that looked like station names. Outside a stadium, something like "ley-tist-skohrz." Read them out loud, and suddenly they make sense. This was an ad for Google's voice search.
THE GUARDIAN | Three Little Pigs | 2012
What happens if you drop the fairy tale of the Three Little Pigs into today's news environment? The Guardian turned its answer into a two-minute film. It gives me chills every time I watch it.
ASOS | Urban Tour | 2012
Click on a dancer, and everyone around them freezes while that one person keeps moving. Then you can buy what they're wearing. Incredibly simple, and incredibly new for its time.
VOLKSWAGEN | DON'T MAKE UP AND DRIVE | 2012
You're watching a tutorial on how to do your makeup, when suddenly you hear a car crash and the screen shakes. That's the one-minute video VOLKSWAGEN put out on YouTube in 2012.
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.
DORITOS | DIPS DESPERADO | 2012
Only 1 in 10 people in the UK were dipping their chips. To move that number, AMV BBDO invented a legendary Mexican who never existed.
Heineken | Star Player | 2011
72% of Champions League fans watch at home, alone. Heineken and AKQA turned that loneliness into competition. Watching TV while predicting the next play on your phone — "Star Player" was the world's first live dual-screen football game.
WALKERS CRISPS | SANDWICH | 2011
There really is a town in England called Sandwich. This is the story of how celebrities showed up there one after another and took over the town for three days.
T-MOBILE | Welcome Home | 2011
In 2010, at the arrivals hall of Heathrow Airport, tired passengers walked out to find 300 people suddenly bursting into song. A choir that recreated even the sound of instruments using only their voices turned the cold, impersonal arrivals hall into a celebration in an instant.
DURAND ACADEMY | Shine a Light on Opportunity | 2011
A public primary school in London beat out the United Nations and Renault to win Gold in the PR category at Cannes. Just the idea of a school's PR effort taking down national institutions is fascinating on its own.
BBC | Winter Olympics 2010 | 2010
I never expected an Olympics promo to pull from Inuit mythology for the Vancouver Games. But somehow, it fits perfectly.
POLO MINT SWEETS | SNOW STAMP | 2010
In 12/2009, the whole of the UK was blanketed in snow. Someone had an idea: "This blank white snow looks just like a POLO mint." So they made a giant stamp and pressed it into parks and benches everywhere.
PEPSICO | Sandwich | 2010
There's an actual town in Kent, England, named Sandwich. Walkers took over the whole thing. Turning a place name into a campaign feels almost too clever to be fair.
P&G | Flora | 2009
Chris Cunningham shoots a perfume ad. The man behind the nightmarish music videos for Aphex Twin and Björk takes on Gucci's new fragrance.
T MOBILE | Life's for Sharing - Dance | 2009
2009, London's Liverpool Street Station. In the middle of the rush hour crowd, one commuter started dancing. Then another, then another. Before anyone knew it, 350 people were dancing their hearts out to "Shout" in a full-blown celebration.
AEG | THE WORLD IS NOISY ENOUGH | 2009
In 2009, a slightly unusual billboard showed up on the streets of London. Advertising AEG's quiet washing machines, this billboard didn't just display an ad—it measured the surrounding noise levels in real time and kept sending that data to a website.
Nike | Take It To The Next Level | 2008
This film traces a soccer player's path from amateur beginnings all the way to the national team, all seen through his own eyes. Honestly, the idea of doing it in first-person view is something you might think of on your own. But the scale here is different, and so is the money behind it. The sheer luxury of lining up Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Wayne Rooney, Cesc Fàbregas, Zlatan Ibrahimović, and even manager Arsène Wenger. Of course it was directed by Guy Ritchie. Just picturing it is fun.
CADBURY | GORILLA | 2008
A gorilla plays the drums. That's it. For 90 seconds, no product, no dialogue. Just drumming along to a Phil Collins song. And somehow, that was enough to make the whole world smile.
SONY | PLAY-DOH | 2008
Rabbits filling up an entire city. And here's the thing: this isn't CGI. It's all stop-motion. It's completely insane.
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.
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.
HONDA | IMPOSSIBLE DREAM | 2006
This two-minute ad aired in the UK on December 2, 2005 (12/2). Set to Andy Williams's "The Impossible Dream," a man in a racing suit moves from one historic Honda vehicle to the next. The sequence gets wonderfully wild—he jumps off a waterfall in a boat and comes floating back out of the mist in a hot air balloon. It all ends with Garrison Keillor's voice saying "I couldn't have put it better myself," wrapping up a perfect two minutes.
STELLA ARTOIS | Ice Skating Priests | 2006
Monks skating on a frozen pond. A young one falls through the ice, and his fellow monks rush over—not to him, but to the beer. Just when you think they've pulled it to safety, they push it back under the ice again. Two minutes, black and white. By the end, all you can say is "oh, I got had."
APPEALNOW.COM | KICKING | 2005
Released in the UK in 2005, this shocking video shows a parking warden suddenly tackling a passerby, pinning him to the ground, and finally kicking him. It became a talked-about viral ad that was both darkly funny and full of anger at unfair parking tickets.
NSPCC | Ventriloquist | 2005
"What's 9 times 8?" The one who answers is a ventriloquist sitting behind a little girl. No one notices him at all. I still get chills watching this 70-second film NSPCC made back in 2005.
PLAYSTATION 2 | Fun, Anyone? | 2004
Not a single second of gameplay footage appears. And yet I've never seen an ad that feels this much like a game. In Brazil, 1,500 people built a human mountain, climbing it over and over, only to be knocked down again and again. At the end, just one line appears: "Fun, Anyone?"
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.
BARCLAYS | Fluent in Finance | 2003
In 2003, the British bank Barclays brought in none other than Samuel L. Jackson. The director was Jonathan Glazer, who made "Sexy Beast." With a lineup this impressive, they created a series of commercials about money.
TANGO | BARREL | 2003
In 2003, the British fizzy drink brand TANGO came back with that legendary slogan. "You Know When You've Been Tango'd" — the catchphrase that stirred controversy in the '90s but made its mark on advertising history was revived with a new agency.
TANGO | SEAL | 2003
Orcas toy with a baby seal like a ball, then toss it onto the beach. For the first 40 seconds, it keeps up the pretense of being a nature documentary.
Xbox | Life is Short, Play More (Champagne) | 2002
A baby born in a delivery room bursts straight through the window, flies into the sky, ages before your eyes, and crashes into a grave. 52 seconds. In 2002, this one film shook all of Europe.
NSPCC | CARTOON | 2002
A boy who looks like he stepped out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon gets hit by his father. Burned with a cigarette. Pushed down the stairs. A laugh track plays, and because he's a cartoon, he bounces right back. But in the final moment, the boy turns into a real child, and he doesn't move.
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.
SPECIAL OLYMPICS | DIFFERENT | 2001
The year was 2001. That year, Special Olympics put forward a single word: "DIFFERENT." This ad went on to win gold.
DR PEPPER DRINK | What's the worst that could happen? | 2001
In 2001, Mother London launched a campaign called "What's the worst that could happen?" aimed at teens in the UK market. This is one of the ads from that campaign — a comedy commercial where the moment you pick up a DR PEPPER, the actual "worst" really does happen to you.
NIKE | BEAUTIFUL | 2000
This NIKE ad is from 2000. The title is "BEAUTIFUL." Somehow, that title alone already tells you something.
HORNBY HOBBIES | Beautiful Boy | 1999
London, 1999. Just hearing that John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy" was used in a commercial is enough to make my heart skip a beat. And when that commercial is for Hornby model railways, it hits even harder.
LEVI STRAUSS & CO. | ID | 1999
In 1999, a yellow puppet took over the world. Riding in a beat-up blue car, bobbing its head to a techno beat. When the police pull them over, it shows its ID, just like that. Human or puppet, both totally normal. Nobody ever bothered explaining the absurdity of it all.
IMPULSE | ART SCHOOL | 1998
A nude model at an art school "reacts" when a woman arrives late to class. The awkwardness of the moment gets expressed through the objects around them, used as metaphors. This was a body spray commercial that aired on British television in 1998.
VOLKSWAGEN | Surprisingly Ordinary Prices - Dentist | 1997
A dentist, hand still inside a patient's mouth, freezes with wide eyes. That single shot became part of British advertising history in the 90s.
BRITVIC | SAINT GEORGE | 1997
A 90-second commercial that ran just 10 times carved its name into advertising history. The budget went almost entirely into production, and the airtime was limited to a single show, TFI Friday. This wasn't cutting corners—it was the plan all along.
GUINNESS | Not everything in black and white makes sense (Bicycle) | 1997
A fish hops on a bicycle and pedals smoothly off the edge of the screen. In that one moment, every bit of logic built up before it gets turned upside down.
VOLKSWAGEN GROUP | LUNCH-BREAK | 1996
London, 1996. This was the era when Volkswagen was taking on the UK market around the theme of "affordability." The title is "LUNCH-BREAK." What happens during a lunch break? There's something in that humor and sharp eye for detail that feels distinctly BMP DDB Needham.
JOHN SMITH’S BITTER | Penguins | 1994
In 1994, a British beer brand ran with the slogan "No nonsense," putting penguins who tap dance and sing on screen alongside comedian Jack Dee, who wears a scowl the whole time.
LEVI | Creek | 1994
In a black-and-white scene by a river, two girls catch a glimpse of a naked man. What had been left behind wasn't just clothes — it was a pair of 501s. It looks like a modest little ad, but this is the one BBH's own founder has called his personal favorite.