Emotion
472 articles
Anthropic | Keep Thinking | 2025
Anthropic ran its first-ever TV ad. The company is growing fast in the business AI world, but barely anyone outside that world knows its name. So the message it chose was: "Keep thinking."
Apple | Shot on iPhone | 2025
"Shot on iPhone" started out as a camera ad for the iPhone 6s and has now run for 10 years, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes Lions in 2025. It's a textbook example of a long-running brand campaign.
HERTOG JAN | DON'T DRINK HERTOG JAN | 2025
A beer brand telling people "don't drink." On paper, that sounds like career suicide. But it's exactly what put this brand at the top of the Dutch market.
HYUNDAI | TREE CORRESPONDENTS | 2025
Giving trees a voice sounds like a clever idea right off the bat. But what they actually did was the opposite: they simply made it possible for humans to hear what trees were already saying. Deforestation is one of the causes of global warming, yet it only gets 5% of climate coverage. So they made trees into "correspondents."
MCDONALD’S | WINTER TAKES ON COLORS | 2025
A McDonald's restaurant turned into one giant coloring book. What happens when you hand customers the power to add color during Poland's long winter?
SICKKIDS FOUNDATION | THE COUNT | 2025
It's a film celebrating a 150th anniversary, but what you see isn't the hospital's history—it's kids running with everything they've got. What's being celebrated isn't the past, it's the next birthday.
ACKO | TAILOR TEST | 2025
An Indian tailor finds the risk of heart disease with nothing but a measuring tape. He measures your waist and hips, and if something seems off, he quietly stamps the bill. On the stamp is a phone number for a free checkup. This is what an insurance company did before it ever tried to sell insurance.
ROCKET | Own the Dream | 2025
The moment the Super Bowl commercial ended, 65,000 people in the stadium started singing. Millions of people watching on TV hummed along too. It wasn't the commercial, and it wasn't the halftime show—it was a 15-second live singalong that slipped right into the broadcast. Both the NFL and FOX had initially said it couldn't be done.
CORONA | SUN RESERVE | 2025
For its 100th anniversary, Corona did something unheard of: it turned the sun itself into a protected reserve. Usually when you hear "reserve," you think forests or oceans — nobody protects the sun. And the way they pulled it off was a total legal hack.
BILLBOARD ARABIA | THE SECOND RELEASE | 2025
Bringing back a forgotten diva with AI. And timing it to Saudi Arabia's National Day, no less. The moment I heard this, my first thought was "wait, is this a good idea?" But the result was a Cannes Lions Gold - in a category where only 0.78% of all entries win.
HERALBONY | HERALBONY Art Prize | 2025
A venture company from Iwate won Gold at Cannes Lions, in the "Glass: The Lion for Change" category. This is the story of HERALBONY, a company that has treated art by artists with intellectual disabilities not as charity, but as business.
WAITROSE & PARTNERS | Sweet Suspicion: A Deliciously Festive Whodunnit | 2025
The star dessert at Christmas dinner has vanished. Every member of the family is a suspect. With Succession's Matthew Macfadyen and Fleabag's Sian Clifford in the cast — an unlikely lineup for a supermarket ad — Waitrose pulled off a surprising two-part mystery.
RCN/PRIME | FICTIONAL INSURANCE | 2025
When a soap opera character gets into an accident, they're never insured. It's such an obvious gap that nobody thinks about it. A campaign out of Colombia let viewers take out insurance on their favorite characters.
大塚製薬 | THE DAY #C105 | 2025
Just hearing the phrase "load-in day" at Comiket makes my heart beat a little faster. This ad captures that day through the lens of health management.
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.
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.
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.
THE RING | THE 4TH JUDGE | 2025
An AI scored a boxing match, and the result was Tyson Fury cursing it out live on air. This wasn't just a tech demo — it was a challenge to a rule that had stood for 100 years: that three humans decide who wins.
サントリーホールディングス | 天然水「大自然を味方に」篇 | 2025
There's a scene where someone opens a bottle cap, but the product packaging stays blurry the whole time. And somehow, nobody minds. All eyes are glued to a small figure running down a mountain trail.
カロリーメイト | 狭い広い世界で | 2024
Through the screen of a smartphone, someone had been watching a whole year in the life of a student preparing for exams. The 2019 song "Boku no Koto" gets a new orchestral arrangement, and all three members of Mrs. GREEN APPLE even make cameo appearances.
earth music&ecology | いいことある服。 | 2024
To mark its 25th anniversary, earth music&ecology has gone all in on the word "purpose." After spending about a year with everyone involved rethinking what makes the brand "itself," they landed on this film: a woman wakes to her morning alarm, touches her clothes, and finds herself surrounded by flowers and butterflies. Honestly, I have no idea where I'm supposed to feel excited.
今西数英教室 | 一生忘れない塾。 | 2024
Every year's ad from this brand is good. But this "Song Edition" is on another level.
MASTERCARD | ROOM FOR EVERYONE | 2024
Two years after the war began, support among Polish people for Ukrainian refugees had dropped to 52%. As Ukrainians came to account for 10% of new businesses opening, they started being seen, almost without anyone noticing, as "competitors." This campaign used data to turn that mood around.
富士フイルム | あしたに続く写真 | 2024
Kazu, Furuta, and Tulio each look back at their past while gazing at old photos. Not every meaningful photo needs a dramatic story behind it, but a single picture that captures a true turning point in someone's life carries a weight that words just can't match.
カロリーメイト | 光も影も | 2024
The tenth installment in the series, and the first time an art school exam candidate took the lead role. Boys had taken the lead four years running, from '19 to '22, so longtime fans who'd been thinking "maybe it's a girl's turn soon" couldn't help but grin.
アクエリアス | NEW YOU キャンペーン 泳げるようになりたい | 2024
This is a video following a 75-year-old grandmother over 30 days, starting from when she could barely even put her face in the water, as she works toward swimming 25 meters freestyle. It's lovely to see swimmer Kosuke Kitajima coaching her wholeheartedly, showing that age doesn't matter when you want to swim. But what really makes this commercial so moving isn't that part.
UN WOMEN | Child Wedding Cards | 2024
A budget under $1,500. No AI. No celebrities. No special effects. Just wedding invitations drawn by girls aged 5 to 15. They sent them to members of parliament—and the law changed.
CERAVE | Michael CeraVe | 2024
Roping in an actor whose name just happens to sound similar, growing fake news across the whole country for three weeks, then revealing the truth at the Super Bowl. This is completely unhinged (the highest compliment). The client, Michael Cera, and the 450 influencers who jumped on board - everyone involved is out of their minds.
SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE | Play It Safe | 2024
This isn't an ad for condoms. It's a movie made for the Sydney Opera House's 50th anniversary. The title is "Play It Safe," and the lyrics Tim Minchin sings are all about "don't take risks, let's play it safe" — yet the footage thoroughly celebrates "dangerous creativity." That irony works incredibly well.
PHILIPS | REFURB (Better Than New) | 2024
Stop selling new products, and sell only repaired ones instead. That's the decision Philips made, and it won a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. This isn't a story about a clever ad idea — it's about changing the way a company actually sells things.
SOL CEMENT | SIGHTWALKS | 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.
DOVE | CODE MY CROWN | 2024
85% of Black gamers say they don't see their own hair represented in video games. Dove's response wasn't an ad—it was a 200-page technical guide.
PETPACE | ANIMAL ALERTS | 2024
Earthquakes can't be predicted, even with today's most advanced science. But dogs might be able to do what science can't. "ANIMAL ALERTS," launched in Lima, Peru, is the world's first early warning system that uses dogs' physical data to predict earthquakes.
高橋酒造 | 生きてくだけで冒険だ。 | 2024
"Just live freely," they say—but nothing is scarier than freedom. A sake maker in Kumamoto addresses this line to young people, and it's an opening that doesn't feel like a typical liquor commercial at all. The idea of comparing life to an RPG never feels cheap—instead, it comes through as hope.
DP WORLD | THE MOVE TO -15 | 2024
Frozen shipping containers have been kept at -18°C for 100 years. Nobody ever questioned that number—until DP World asked "why?" By raising it just three degrees, they got an entire industry moving.
日本マクドナルド | スマイルあげない | 2024
McDonald's broke its own 50-year-old promise of a "0 Yen Smile," all by itself. "I Won't Give You a Smile," sung by ano, was a recruitment campaign on the surface, but underneath it was a declaration of resolve.
ソニー・ミュージックレーベルズ | 何色でもない花 | 2024
Utada Hikaru dancing in a pure white world was so beautiful it had me within the first 30 seconds.
BANCO DEL PACÍFICO | GAMER LOAN | 2024
Skins and items as collateral. Eight out of ten young people in Ecuador don't own a car or a house, so they can't get a loan. But they do have a game account they've poured hundreds of hours into. A bank showed up and said that account has real value.
朝日放送テレビ | M-1グランプリ2023×日食なつこ「ログマロープ」 | 2024
There are manzai comedians who stake their whole lives on four minutes. Playing over the promotional video for M-1 Grand Prix 2023 is Natsuko Nisshoku's "Logma Rope." She couldn't write a song for six months, and this track was born at the end of what felt like hell.
HEINEKEN | BAR EXPERIENCE | 2024
Turning "bar work experience" into an official LinkedIn credential badge that's actually recognized by 25 companies, including Coca-Cola and McDonald's, when they hire. Heineken built this wonderfully absurd (but completely serious) system.
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.
FILSA COLOMBIA | FILTER CAPS | 2024
Just snap a cap weighing only 24g, made from cornstarch, onto a bottle, and cloudy water from a pond or well turns into drinking water. This isn't just advertising — the water actually changes.
KOREAN NATIONAL POLICE AGENCY | Knock Knock | 2023
Inspired by Morse code, this emergency reporting system lets people ask for help without saying a word. Just tap the screen, and the police know where you are. It's the first change to Korea's emergency reporting system in 65 years — the sound of a knock.
APPLE | RELAX, IT'S IPHONE: R.I.P. LEON | 2023
The lizard you're watching isn't moving. Worst case scenario, it's dead... wait, it's alive! That thirty-second swing from despair to joy lines up perfectly with iOS 16's "undo send" message feature.
クラシエホームプロダクツ | 日本の四季 | 2023
A camera slowly circles a cherry tree as the seasons pass by. There's a commercial that took over 80 days to shoot, all for this one tree. The moment I heard about the plan, I thought, "This is going to be tough" — and I found myself admiring the trust it took to actually pull it off.
富士フイルム アスタリフト | 列車のふたり ナノテクノロジー | 2023
What happens when you bring a story into a cosmetics commercial? This ad feels like an experiment in just that. Aoi Miyazaki, disguised in a trench coat, sunglasses, and a blonde wig, jumps onto a train. Masaki Okada, claiming he's "come from the future," launches into an endless explanation of nanotechnology. Seiko Matsuda's "Red Sweet Pea" plays in the background, and in an atmosphere that can't quite decide if it's serious or comic, the two set off on a strange journey together.
東京ガス | 母の推し活 | 2023
There are a few ad series I look forward to every year, wondering "what will they do this time" — and Tokyo Gas's brand ads are one of them. Their "Family Bonds" series, running since 2008, has delivered one gut-punch after another straight to the Japanese heart, starting with the famous "Lunchbox Email" spot. I admire their work. The 2023 entry, "Mom's Fan Life," tells in 90 seconds the story of a mother who falls for a K-pop idol thirty years younger than her and watches her life open up as a result. It became a huge hit, racking up over 5 million views on Twitter within three days. This time, though, I found myself thinking "it's good, but..."
EUROFARMA | SCROLLING THERAPY | 2023
Parkinson's disease slowly erases facial expressions. People lose the ability to smile, to look surprised. But this app turns the scrolling time everyone already wastes every day into a tool for getting those muscles back.