Emotion
473 articles
B3 STOCK EXCHANGE & UNITED NATIONS GLOBAL COMPACT | EART4 | 2023
Earth became a company. And one on the verge of bankruptcy, no less. At first I had no idea what that even meant. But it turns out this was the perfect "translation" for business leaders.
DOORDASH | Self-Love Bouquet | 2023
Eleven roses arrive for Valentine's Day, and the 12th is "Rose™" — the rose-shaped sex toy that went viral on TikTok. DoorDash slipped it into bouquets and sold them. They sold out in three days and won the Grand Prix in PR at Cannes Lions.
RENAULT | PLUG-INN | 2023
Is it an ad, or is it a business? Renault's "PLUG-INN" came to smash that whole line apart. It took the Grand Prix in the Creative Strategy category at Cannes Lions 2023.
MICHELOB ULTRA | DREAMCASTER | 2023
Cameron Black was born blind, but he had one dream: to call an NBA game. Michelob Ultra spent a year making that dream actually come true.
大塚製薬 | 入学から、この世界だった僕たちへ。 | 2023
A track athlete running in a mask, a canoe club member paddling at dusk, a kendo student swinging a sword at home. You can only see half their face, but their eyes alone carry all the intensity.
SOTETSU | A TRAIN OF MEMORIES | 2023
Two minutes, one continuous shot. A story that unfolds entirely inside a train. A father and daughter drift apart and grow close again across 12 years, all while the train car sways around them. That's all it takes to bring you to tears.
大塚製薬 | スカフィンのうた | 2023
A returnable bottle's journey, told in paper-cut animation and song. Kaho Nakamura's voice is gentle, Moji Tsuchiya's paper cuts, pieced together one second a day, are so lovable that by the end you kind of want to return a bottle yourself.
MAKRO | LIFE EXTENDING STICKERS | 2023
Those tiny stickers on fruit? They turned them into a medium. That alone cut Colombia's food waste by 70 tons a week. This might be the ultimate example of how small an ad can be and still work.
GORILLAZ | Gorillaz Presents | 2023
In December 2022, something impossible appeared over Times Square and Piccadilly Circus. A four-person band dozens of meters tall, playing music on top of the buildings. Only visible if you held up your phone. A band that doesn't exist was, unmistakably, right there.
NIKE | Footballverse | 2023
This is the answer NIKE gave to "who is the greatest player of all time." In a secret research lab in Switzerland, Ronaldinho, CR7, and Mbappé clash across time and space over four and a half minutes. The conclusion: "the best is yet to come." Simple, but powerful.
NOBLEX/ PARAMOUNT+ | THE CEO (El Gerente) | 2023
A promotion from 2017 turned into a 105-minute movie six years later, got a theatrical release, and won Gold at Cannes. It's the kind of thing that gives you goosebumps just thinking that it actually happened.
MIXI | 生徒指導篇／闇の神殿篇／保冷剤篇／公園篇／友達の兄篇／起床篇／父篇／年越し篇 | 2023
Just lining up the titles already makes you curious about what this ad could be. What on earth is the "Temple of Darkness" episode? And the "Ice Pack" episode has me curious too.
INTEL | CERTIFIED HUMAN | 2023
A technology that can expose a deepfake in an instant, just by looking at the blood flow in someone's face. Intel turned this into a real ad campaign.
I AM OTHER | CASH IN CASH OUT | 2023
Pharrell Williams, 21 Savage, and Tyler, The Creator look like clay puppets in this video, but none of them were filmed for even a second. It's all CG. And the whole idea actually grew out of the fact that they couldn't be filmed.
PENNY | The Wish | 2022
At Christmas 2021, German supermarket PENNY made a three-minute film. A son asks his mother an offhand question, and she answers: she wishes he could get his youth back. All of it—the late nights, the heartbreak, the adventures sneaking out—everything the pandemic took away.
大塚製薬 | Midnight Train | 2022
A whole year of a student's life flows past the window of a night train. Carrying both the things they gave their all to and the things left unfinished, the train still keeps running toward morning.
キングソフト | WPS Cloud「働き方を自由にする」篇 | 2022
A man with two faces: special agent and office worker. While carrying out a mission to rescue a hostage from a burning, collapsing building, he gets a call from a coworker at his IT company, and right there on the spot he finishes editing a document using WPS Cloud. The sheer amount packed into 30 seconds is incredible.
PENGUIN BOOKS | Portuguese (Re)Constitution | 2022
Portugal's first-ever Cannes Lions Grand Prix. And it won out of 1,058 entries. The moment I watched the video, I knew this was a win that had to happen. The sheer intensity of watching a blue pencil cover over the constitution, page by page, is something else.
DECATHLON | THE BREAKAWAY | 2022
Six inmates at a maximum-security prison in Belgium go cycling in a virtual space with people from the outside world. That single sentence was enough to move me.
MARS | HOPE REEF | 2022
A cat food company planted letters on the ocean floor. H-O-P-E. Visible from space, on Google Earth. And made of living coral.
POLYCAM X UNESCO | BACKUP UKRAINE | 2022
In 2022, Russian bombing threatened to wipe out not just lives in Ukraine, but also the sculptures and churches that had watched over its cities for centuries. So creators from the ad industry came up with an idea: turn the smartphone everyone already owns into a tool for protecting cultural treasures.
APPLE | Escape from the Office | 2022
A 9-minute ad. Apple made one in 2022, and it even won the Film Grand Prix at Cannes. It's now in MoMA's permanent collection, too. I watched the whole 9 minutes, start to finish.
COINBASE | Less Talk, More Bitcoin | 2022
Just a QR code bouncing around the screen, for 60 seconds. No celebrities, no narration, no product explanation. At the Super Bowl, the pinnacle of advertising, Coinbase chose to do "nothing."
COX COMMUNICATIONS | Project Convey | 2022
AI turns the emotions on the other side of a video chat into a single emoji. Cox actually built this prototype for people with autism.
UNDER ARMOUR | THE FIRST META SNEAKER (Genesis Curry Flow) | 2022
Stephen Curry set a world record for three-pointers. Under Armour wanted to prepare a commemorative sneaker. But they couldn't make one.
パナソニック | Make New | 2022
When a girl touches a piece of fabric, a cold, lifeless blue world instantly transforms into one overflowing with green. This reversal was actually filmed by flipping the entire set and everyone in it completely upside down.
SCE | The Prevention Grid | 2022
The era where advertising companies make more than just ads has truly arrived. Deloitte Digital built an AI and AR-powered wildfire prevention system for a power company called SCE. It won Gold at Cannes Lions 2022—and this was Deloitte's first-ever Gold Lion, which makes it a real milestone for the industry.
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.
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.
GIRLS WHO CODE | DOJACODE | 2022
"Doja Cat is one of 999 things girls care about." That one sentence sums up the whole idea. If girls aren't interested in coding, why not use one of those 999 things to pull them in? Doja, in this case.
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.
FORD | VERY GAY RAPTOR | 2022
It all started with a single line of hate thrown at a YouTube video. Ford didn't demand an apology, and didn't delete it. Instead, they actually built the car.
ポカリスエット | でも君が見えた | 2021
A clever debate over "Is it CG or not?" matters a hundred million times less than that first "whoa" the moment you watch it.
大塚製薬 | カロリーメイト 見えないもの篇 | 2021
2020 was a year when everyone fought an invisible virus. And CALORIEMATE still delivered its usual commercial to that year's students taking entrance exams. But things didn't go as usual. Remote classes, disinfectant, acrylic partitions, cancelled competitions. The moment Naotaro Moriyama's "Sakura" started playing, the tears wouldn't stop.
THE BIG ISSUE & LINKEDIN | Raising Profiles | 2020
A homeless magazine seller signs up for LinkedIn. As a response to the pandemic, you couldn't ask for a more logical idea.
XBOX | THE BIRTH OF GAMING TOURISM | 2020
Game ads are usually about weapons and heroes. Xbox decided to sell its games as a "tourist destination" instead. You've got to applaud the sheer craziness of that.
HEINEKEN | SHUTTER ADS | 2020
In 2020, the pandemic forced bars to pull down their shutters. The lights went out across the city. So why not put those shutters to work bringing the light back?
NOTPLA | Making Packaging Disappear | 2020
"Notpla" is short for "not plastic." That alone tells you what they're trying to do. It's edible packaging made from seaweed. And the brand itself won the Grand Prix in the Design category at Cannes.
SINYI REALTY | IN LOVE WE TRUST | 2020
A real estate brand film running 7 minutes and 23 seconds made all of Taiwan cry. And it won Taiwan's first-ever Grand Prix in Cannes advertising history. The courage of a real estate company that showed no properties at all, instead talking entirely about "the fear of marriage" - that's thrilling.
Nike | 動かしつづける。自分を。未来を。 / The Future Isn't Waiting. | 2020
In November (11) 2020, all of Japan held its breath for two minutes. The film believed that the urge to play sports could lightly blow away garbage like discrimination. I've watched it ten times. "A standard masterpiece" feels like the right phrase for it, but that makes me wonder: what's the difference between a standard masterpiece and one that isn't standard at all?
Apple | Macの向こうから — まだこの世界にない物語を | 2020
They made an entire 30-second commercial out of nothing but scenes of anime characters sitting down at their Macs. And get this — some of those Macs have logos that are clearly not the real Apple logo, turned into a heart or a pear instead, yet Apple included them anyway. That kind of generosity really shows the brand's sheer confidence.
カロリーメイト | My Way | 2020
The song and the sound effects here are just amazing. Listening to them yanks you straight back to that time in your life. Which tells you something: those sounds don't really exist (much) in the adult world.
BECO | #STEALOURSTAFF | 2020
"Please steal our staff." BECO printed résumés right on their bottles and put them on the shelves of major supermarkets. Getting poached is usually every company's nightmare—but BECO made it happen on purpose.
CARREFOUR | ACT FOR FOOD | 2020
A supermarket broke the law, and ended up changing the law. And for that, it won the Grand Prix at Cannes. This is what it looks like when an ad actually moves society.
SPINNEYS THE LEBANESE BREAST CANCER FOUNDATION | THE BREAD EXAM | 2020
The motion of kneading bread dough and the motion of a breast self-exam. They turned out to be nearly identical. That one observation was enough to break through a cultural taboo.
TINDER | SWIPE NIGHT | 2020
Three hours left until the end of the world. Open Tinder, and a first-person end-of-days drama begins. You're forced to swipe a choice within seven seconds, and that choice changes not just the story, but who you match with.
WARNER MUSIC GROUP | SAYLISTS | 2020
One in twelve children has a speech sound disorder (SSD). The key to therapy is repetition — but for kids, that's just plain boring. So what about music? Or rather, isn't music itself the ultimate form of repetition? Starting from that simple question, Warner Music and ad agency Rothco used an algorithm to analyze a 70-million-song Apple Music catalog and created "Saylists," playlists with genuine therapeutic value.
TELENOR | NAMING THE INVISIBLE PAKISTANIS | 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.