Emotion
36 articles
IDOMED | NIGRUM CORPUS | 2025
"If racism is a disease, the cure is education." To bring that idea to life, a Brazilian medical education institute didn't make a video or a social campaign — they made a book.
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.
DEGIRO & UN WOMEN | Pink Chip | 2024
When a woman becomes CEO, the stock price drops 2 to 3%. According to Harvard researchers, the reason is bias against women. Even though companies led by women perform better in both earnings and stock performance, the stock still falls. A tool was created to fight back against this contradiction with data.
RUH FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIP | The National Sport of Kazakhstan | 2024
A ring where men and women fight each other? Unthinkable, the men raged. But inside their own homes, they said nothing. RUH Fighting Championship exposed that silence.
ASDRA | ABSURD PROMISES | 2024
During Argentina's 2023 presidential election, candidates were making grand, nearly impossible promises, but not one of them said a word about people with disabilities. People with Down syndrome, in particular, were bound by an absurd law: even though their genetic condition never changes, they had to renew their disability certificate every single year or lose their rights. To expose this contradiction, VML and ASDRA started tweeting a certain index in real time during a live presidential debate.
PGLANG | WE CRY TOGETHER | 2023
A six-minute film that won the Grand Prix in Film Craft at Cannes in 2023. Kendrick Lamar and Taylour Paige play a couple in a brutal argument. It was shot in a single take, with live vocals, in March 2020. The intensity makes you forget to breathe the whole time you're watching. This is less an "ad" than a "work" — but at the same time, it's also the piece that showed the world the overwhelming filmmaking craft of pgLang, the creative company Kendrick and his partner Dave Free launched in 2020.
WOMEN IN GAMES | GENDER SWAP | 2022
Male heroes swinging their hips, dancing seductively, striking provocative poses. Taking the movements that have long been treated as "normal" for female characters in games and transplanting them directly onto male characters suddenly makes them feel deeply strange.
HUMANE SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL | SAVE RALPH | 2022
Ralph the rabbit can't see out of one eye. He's deaf in one ear. His back is scarred with chemical burns. And yet he talks proudly about his job as a "tester." This four-minute stop-motion film has been watched more than 150 million times around the world — and it moved Mexico to act.
GRUPO ESTRATÉGICO GE PAE | MORNING AFTER ISLAND | 2022
In Honduras, taking the morning-after pill can get you up to six years in prison. So they floated a small wooden platform beyond the border — or more precisely, out on the water, where no country's laws can reach.
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.
POLITICAL SHAKTI + THE TIMES OF INDIA | The Nominate Me Selfie | 2022
There's a campaign that turned selfies into "nomination resumes" sent straight to political parties. Women wrote their achievements and experience right onto their own photos, then sent them all at once, with no way to look away, to the phones of male-dominated party leadership.
SANDY HOOK PROMISE | Back to School Essentials | 2020
A cheerful back-to-school shopping scene slowly turns into a nightmare over 66 seconds. Binders and shoes are, for American kids, just tools to survive school — and this ad hits you with that reality when you least expect it.
UNITED4RESCUE | DROWNED REQUIEM | 2020
Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" plays as a requiem on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. A symbol of Europe rings out over the graves of refugees. In 2020, while everyone's attention was on COVID and Trump, people were still drowning at sea. A German citizens' group sank the song Europe holds dearest into the ocean.
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.
NETFLIX | 人間まるだし。 | 2020
The narration opens with a sarcastic line: "What a beautiful age we live in." In 2019, when everyone was burning with "correctness," Netflix brought out The Naked Director and declared, flat out, "Human, Exposed." The moment Shibuya turned entirely red, you could feel just how powerful this ad was.
THE FEMALE COMPANY | THE TAMPON BOOK | 2020
Sell tampons... as a book. In Germany, period products are taxed at 19%, while caviar, truffles, and books are taxed at only 7%. So why not turn tampons into a book?
Nike | Dream Crazier | 2019
This 90-second spot, narrated by Serena Williams, aired during the 2019 Oscars broadcast. No new technology, no imagery you hadn't seen before—and yet it became one of the defining ads of the year.
KLOOP | KOSHOGO | 2019
A white cloth appeared in the city. It was supposed to be a symbol of marriage—but it had become a record of violence.
BRBR | HEROES OF TODAY | 2019
The screen is black and white: Berlin, 1936. A Black athlete walks down a street hung with swastikas. People passing by turn to stare and whisper, and even a child hurls a slur at him. Then, just as he steps into the stadium, it hits you — wait, this is a tweet from today.
KRAFT | LEGAL-ADE | 2019
A kid opens a lemonade stand, and the police shut it down. In America, this isn't an urban legend. It actually happens.
CARREFOUR | Black Supermarket | 2018
This isn't a supermarket ad. It's a lesson in how to pick a fight with the law.
MARCH FOR OUR LIVES PARKLAND STUDENTS | Price on Our Lives | 2018
$1.05. That's the total amount Senator Marco Rubio received from the NRA, divided by the total number of students in Florida. It's the orange price tag that survivors of the Parkland high school shooting wore as the "price" of their own lives. The campaign generated 826 media placements and 2.2 billion media impressions, and through the power of math, anger, and design, it irreversibly changed the gun control debate in America.
UNILEVER (CLEAR) | BULLISH BOSS | 2017
A boss works himself into a rage until he finally shrinks down into a tiny white speck falling onto his own hair. With black-and-white footage and the physical language of butoh dance, this ad lands the message "stress causes dandruff" in one single image.
HEINEKEN | Gender Violence | 2017
A beer commercial lines up all the classic symbols of "manliness" — muscles, boxing, welding — then suddenly declares that how a man treats women is what truly defines him. And it's coming from a brand that's called itself "the beer for men" since 1944.
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.
LA SIRENA | END THE SILENCE | 2016
A live news anchor appeared on air with a bruise on her face, as if she'd been hit. Viewers were stunned. But it wasn't an accident or an incident — it was a live on-air intervention staged by a supermarket chain.
SAKKER EL DEKKENE (STOP THE SHOP) | LEBANON4SALE | 2015
Fighting corruption can feel like a hopeless battle. But an NGO in Lebanon realized something: corruption is a business too. And if it's a business, it can be shut down.
UN WOMEN | THE AUTOCOMPLETE TRUTH | 2014
Type "women should" into Google's search box, and it fills in the rest with words of discrimination. This wasn't any one person's opinion—it was the answer pulled straight from everyone's search history.
TERRES DES HOMMES | SWEETIE | 2014
A 10-year-old girl identified 1,000 sex offenders in 10 weeks. But she doesn't exist. She's a fully computer-generated virtual girl. This is the story of an ad agency that launched its own criminal investigation.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL | NO MEANS NO | 2013
In 2013, Amnesty International in Norway made an ad to help change a law. In an interactive video, a woman's voice is muted, and then a signature restores it. Few campaigns have put this much direct faith in advertising's power to change society.
GREENPEACE | TOXIC TOURS | 2013
They set up a fake travel agency and started selling tours down a polluted river. The footage shows celebrities grinning as they recommend "snorkeling in crude oil" or "surfing chemical waves" — it's so dark it's hard to laugh.
TROY PUBLIC LIBRARY | Book Burning Party | 2012
Signs went up around town announcing a "book burning party." Everyone was furious. But that anger was exactly the plan to save the library.
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.
NIKE | SKATEBOARDING | 1998
Skate through the city and a security guard comes running. Try a trick in front of a shop and someone starts yelling. In 1998, that was just normal life for skateboarders. Nike's response was a single question: "What if other athletes got treated the same way?"
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.
NSPCC | EXCUSE | 1992
In 1992, a public service ad ran in British cinemas. It opens with nearly a full minute of darkness, then photos of children and the "excuses" given by their abusers appear one after another. Quiet, dark, and impossible to look away from.