Country
231 articles
FIAT | Love Affair | 2017
A woman pauses in front of a puddle. Stepping out of her red 124 Spider, she realizes her high heels are about to get soaked. That's when the man parked next to her, driving a 500X, lays his jacket down over the puddle. Then his shirt. Then his jeans. Until he's down to just his underwear. And then comes that scene — the woman deliberately spills her coffee. His right eyebrow twitches up in a priceless expression.
Skittles | Romance | 2017
This is the 2017 version of Skittles' 30-second Super Bowl spot, from the brand known for "the finger thing." A boy keeps throwing candy at a window—looks like it's shaping up to be a romantic scene, but it's not just his girlfriend who ends up catching them. That reliable punchline strikes again.
BOOST MOBILE | Boost Your Voice | 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.
Old Spice | Odor Blocker Body Wash | 2017
It's Premium Friday, so I figure now's a good time to grin at something wonderfully ridiculous.
WHIRLPOOL | Care Counts | 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.
Gap | Boyfriend Trousers | 2017
I found myself clapping. Claire Danes and Patrick Wilson dance and sing, and at the end, she yanks the trousers off the guy and puts them on herself to strike a pose. And it looks so, so good.
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.
ADIDAS ORIGINALS | ORIGINAL IS NEVER FINISHED | 2017
What does "original" even mean? To answer that question, adidas remixed one of the most overused songs in history, Frank Sinatra's "My Way." The whole idea is ridiculous, and that's exactly why I love it.
BURGER KING | Google Home of The Whopper | 2017
A single 15-second ad caused chaos in living rooms around the world just hours after it aired. The moment the employee on screen said "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?", viewers' Google Home devices started talking back on their own. Google was furious, Wikipedia got hit hard, and public opinion split right down the middle. The result: the Grand Prix in the Direct category at Cannes Lions. Nobody had seen anything like it before.
ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO | Van Gogh's Bedrooms | 2017
You could actually spend the night in Van Gogh's Bedroom. Turning a museum exhibit into a $10-a-night Airbnb stay is a wild idea.
CHEETOS | CHEETOS MUSEUM | 2017
Finding oddly-shaped Cheetos inside the bag, then putting them on display in a museum. This ridiculous idea led to the best sales week in the brand's history.
EXPEDIA | Visit Britain | 2017
Tilt your phone north and you're in Scotland. Tilt it west and you're in Wales. A video experience where the direction you tilt decides your destination.
NETFLIX | Spanish Lessons | 2017
Scrolling through Twitter, they noticed fans all tweeting the same thing: "Watching Narcos is teaching me Spanish." So they thought — let's actually turn that into a lesson.
KRAFT HEINZ | New and Not Improved | 2017
Kraft Heinz changed the recipe for its mac and cheese and kept selling it for three months without telling a single soul. 50 million boxes of it. Staying quiet about a change is about the one move you're never supposed to make in advertising, and that's exactly what they did.
GEICO | Unskippable | 2016
YouTube ads get skipped after five seconds. 96% of people hit that button. But when a voice tells you "This ad has already ended, so it can't be skipped," your finger stops.
Nike | Unlimited You | 2016
It starts out like your typical brand film: a warm narrator's voice, a child growing into an athlete. But the moment a gymnast rips through the "The End" logo, this ad becomes something else entirely.
Honda | UNI-CUB | 2016
Right around the time everyone started making drone-shot music videos, this one came in and knocked everyone flat with how polished it was. Five and a half minutes, and I watched the whole thing without skipping once.
GOOGLE, GE, MINI, NEW YORK TIMES | NYT VR | 2016
A million pieces of cardboard were delivered along with the newspaper. Inside was Google Cardboard. In 2016, the New York Times used it to turn the newspaper business upside down.
JACQUARD WEARABLE FABRIC | JACQUARD WEARABLE FABRIC | 2016
What if technology disappeared every time you put on your clothes? That's exactly what Google set out to do. This is the story of a jacket where you can control calls and music just by brushing your hand across the denim sleeve.
Nike | The Switch | 2016
Cristiano Ronaldo collides with a ball boy and they swap bodies. Spoiler: that's the whole story. And yet for almost six minutes, you can't look away. It's the kind of ad that makes you think, "So this is how far you can go if you really commit."
BEYONCE | FORMATION | 2016
On 2/6/2016, the night before the Super Bowl, a five-minute video dropped on the world without warning, opening with Beyoncé sitting on top of a New Orleans police car sinking in floodwater. With no corporate brand attached to it at all, this piece became the first-ever Cannes Grand Prix winner in the music category.
NYT VR | THE DISPLACED | 2016
The New York Times tucked one million Google Cardboard viewers into copies of its Sunday paper. Inside was an 11-minute VR documentary called "THE DISPLACED." Readers who opened it up found themselves standing right in the middle of a refugee camp. The following year, it won two Grand Prix at Cannes.
PAINT | COLOR FOR THE COLORBLIND | 2016
For the 300 million people worldwide with color blindness, a paint company found a way to "show" them color. Sounds impossible, right?
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.
Gatorade | Forget Me | 2015
184 goals. Abby Wambach, who holds the record for the most goals scored in international soccer history, men's or women's, retired on December 16 (12/16), 2015. Her final message was "Forget me." Right to the end, Wambach was Wambach.
Nike | LAST | 2015
The camera keeps moving backward the whole time. It's graceful, but there's something otherworldly about it too. Set to Aretha Franklin's "Every Little Bit Hurts," that same shot just keeps going.
truTV | First Ever Cinemagraph TV Ad | 2015
A TV commercial that calls itself the world's first cinemagraph. Shot over one night in Times Square, it's just ten seconds long.
Apple | Someday At Christmas | 2015
90 seconds just isn't enough. Honestly, I wish I could watch and listen to this for three hours straight. At this point, it's gone beyond what you'd normally call a commercial.
VOLVO | INTERCEPTION (The Greatest Interception Ever) | 2015
Hijacking the Super Bowl without paying the $4.5 million entry fee. The moment rivals poured $60 million into their own ad slots, Volvo was trending worldwide on Twitter. This is the Cannes Grand Prix winner.
Apple | Misunderstood | 2015
I'm seriously obsessed with this one. I can still vividly remember what I felt the first time I watched it. It shows a shy teenage boy who isn't exactly disliked by his family but definitely isn't the center of attention either, acting in his usual unimpressive way. The mood turns slightly sour, with a vibe of "come on, it's Christmas, put the phone down and spend time with the family" — and then the whole thing flips completely around. I love how skillfully it plays with your emotions.
OWLET BABY CARE | Owlet Smart Sock | 2015
A sock measures a baby's heart rate and oxygen level, and sends an alert to a parent's phone if something seems off. It's a product designed by R/GA that won Gold in the Innovation category at Cannes in 2015.
NATIONAL SEPTEMBER 11TH MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM | 9/11 Memorial Museum Exhibition Design | 2015
70 feet below Ground Zero, there's a museum. But it's not a "finished" museum. As Jake Barton of Local Projects put it: "It doesn't need to be finished. It can be an experience that keeps changing."
MICROSOFT ONENOTE | Collective Project | 2015
Showing college students an ad just doesn't land. So Microsoft stopped making ads and instead "did" the story of a student trying to change the world.
HAMMERHEAD NAVIGATION | HAMMERHEAD ONE | 2015
A "T" shape sitting on your handlebars. This device, named after a shark, handles bike navigation using nothing but light. No phone, no map, no headphones needed. LEDs blinking at the edge of your vision tell you "turn right soon" or "keep going straight." It's so simple that it actually feels brand new.
JOE BOXER | INACTIVITY TRACKER | 2015
The world's first tracker for recording "not moving" was born. At a time when Fitbits covered every wrist, Kmart's pajama brand did the exact opposite.
Under Armour | I Will What I Want | 2014
A world-famous supermodel punches a sandbag. Kicks it. On the wall behind her, cruel comments people wrote about her appear—and vanish with every hit.
Always | #LikeAGirl | 2014
When you ask a grown-up to "run like a girl," they flail their arms and legs around and laugh. But ask a girl who hasn't hit puberty yet, and she runs with everything she's got. That gap took my breath away.
NOT IMPOSSIBLE LABS | PROJECT DANIEL | 2014
A 14-year-old boy who'd lost both arms said he'd rather be dead than become a burden to his family. A video producer who read that article flew to Sudan carrying a 3D printer, with no medical knowledge at all.
RESPIRATORY APP | Alvio | 2014
Kids with asthma hate breathing exercises. But what if your breath itself became the controller for a game? Alvio made a game where a pufferfish swims just by you breathing in and out.
AMERICAN HONDA MOTOR | PROJECT DRIVE IN | 2014
You need a car to go to a drive-in theater. That point is so obvious nobody ever says it out loud, but Honda took it seriously.
WATER IS LIFE | BUCKET LIST | 2014
When you hear "bucket list," you probably think of things you want to do before you die—a luxury that assumes you'll live a long life. But in sub-Saharan Africa, one in five children doesn't live to see their fifth birthday. There really is a world where a four-year-old needs a bucket list.
BEATS BY DRE | THE PILLS | 2014
A speaker grew arms and legs and started talking. Its voice belonged to the likes of Eminem and Chris Rock — a pretty star-studded mouth.
CORONA EXTRA | LUNA CORONA | 2014
A crescent moon floating above a New York rooftop looks, on one specific night, exactly like a lime wedge stuck in a Corona bottle. It's not a coincidence—it's the result of careful calculations involving astronomers.
THE BARBARIAN GROUP | CINDER | 2013
At Cannes Lions 2013, the very first Grand Prix in the newly created Innovation Lions category went to a development tool made by an ad agency. And it's one they give away for free. It sounds like an odd thing to win an award for, but the reasoning behind it makes complete sense.
THE LINCOLN MOTOR COMPANY | HELLO AGAIN | 2013
A brand that had been around for 90 years decided to shed 90 years of being "your dad's car." The password was "Hello, Again." Nice to meet you, once more.
OLD SPICE | Hawkridge | 2013
In 2013, Old Spice released a scent called Hawkridge. The ad for it shows a man playing poker suddenly getting swarmed by hawks—you have no idea what's going on, but somehow you totally get it.
OLD SPICE | DIKEMBE MUTOMBO'S 4 1/2 WEEKS TO SAVE THE WORLD | 2013
According to the Mayan calendar, the world was supposed to end on 12/21/2012 (December 21, 2012). Old Spice picked its savior: Dikembe Mutombo, one of the greatest defenders in NBA history. And the whole idea of saving the world through an 8-bit game is already pretty absurd.
P&G | Thank You, Mom – Best Job | 2012
At the 2012 London Olympics, P&G called itself the "Proud Sponsor of Moms" — the official sponsor of mothers everywhere.