Emotion
473 articles
OLD TOWN ROAD FT. BILLY RAY CYRUS | Old Town Road (Official Movie) | 2020
A 20-year-old college dropout bought a beat for 30 dollars and wrote a song over it in a single day. That song was "Old Town Road." The official music video went on to win the Grand Prix in Entertainment Lions for Music at Cannes in 2021.
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.
ABINBEV | Contract for Change | 2020
You'd think this was a beer commercial, but it turned out to be about a contract. And that contract was trying to change America's entire farming system. This is a story about an ad that didn't just talk about something — it became the mechanism itself.
MASTERCARD | Roadside Market | 2020
On Romania's rural roads, you'll find farmers sitting with homemade vegetables and cheese laid out for sale. They're not on any map, and they can only take cash. A business that doesn't officially exist.
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?
REGENT PARK SCHOOL OF MUSIC | PARKSCAPES | 2020
Instead of "receiving" donations, why not "earn" them? Kids learning music ended up standing on the same ground as the pros who make a living from it.
BURGER KING | CONFUSING TIMES | 2020
2020 was a year when everyone felt confused. Burger King made a radio ad that put that exact feeling of confusion into words—things like catching a sneeze with your elbow, then high-fiving with that same elbow. And the twist is, it was actually an ad for the Impossible Whopper, which tastes like meat but isn't meat. Presenting confusion as confusion, honestly, turned out to be the most honest approach of all.
GOOGLE | Timelapse in Google Earth | 2020
Gathering 24 million satellite photos, this project let anyone, for free, fast-forward through how the Earth has changed from 1984 to 2020. Just type in a place name in the search bar, and you can watch your own hometown transform over 37 years.
FONDATION DE FRANCE | BEE_INFLUENCER | 2020
I always thought influencers were a human thing. Turns out I was wrong. A bee smaller than an inch gathered 280,000 followers on Instagram and poured the ad money straight into saving her own species. This really happened.
GO EQUAL MOVEMENT | #GOEQUAL | 2020
In June 2019, the moment she scored in a Women's World Cup match, Brazilian soccer legend Marta Vieira da Silva dramatically pointed to her own cleat. It was a historic moment, breaking the record for most World Cup goals scored by any player, male or female. There was no corporate sponsor logo on that shoe—just a pink and blue equality symbol shining on it.
NEW ZEALAND AIDS FOUNDATION | Sperm Positive | 2020
A sperm bank for HIV-positive men. What comes to mind when you hear that? On 11/27/2019, just before World AIDS Day, it actually existed in New Zealand.
加賀市 | 加賀市新幹線対策室 | 2020
Has there ever been local government PR that put jealousy front and center like this? Taking the frustration of losing out to Kanazawa and turning it straight into fuel for a "Go, Kaga!" cheering mood. You rarely see local PR this honest, and this lovable.
BECK’S | BECK'S FREQUENCY | 2020
Brazil is pilsner paradise. BECK'S makes the bitterest beer around, but it's behind competitors in both distribution and budget. So what did they do? They got people to drink their rivals' beer.
CHARITÉ BERLIN UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL | Printed by Parkinson's | 2020
A 3D printer is shaking. It's been injected with data from a patient's tremors.
MUMBAI POLICE | THE PUNISHING SIGNAL | 2020
The more you honk, the longer the light stays red. Mumbai, one of the noisiest cities in the world, built a traffic signal that punishes honking itself.
トヨタモビリティパーツ | 連続10秒ドラマ「愛の停止線」SEASON2 | 2020
A 10-second commercial that somehow packs in a full story arc, complete with a product punchline at the end. And not just once, but as a whole series. You laugh, you want to see what happens next, and before you know it, you've remembered the product name.
GOOGLE | Creatability | 2019
Moving your face to make music. Drawing a picture by listening to sound. Turning your whole body into an instrument. This wasn't a tool made for people with disabilities—it was an experiment that asked, "What do we even mean by creativity?"
NIKE | DREAM CRAZY | 2019
A man kneeling became the face of the world's biggest sports brand. An ad that gets people burning Nike products and rushing out to buy new ones at the very same time? That doesn't happen often.
MARS | THE LION'S SHARE | 2019
Animals are some of advertising's biggest earners, yet they're never paid a cent. The industry decided to fix that contradiction itself. Winner of the Grand Prix in the SDGs category at Cannes Lions 2019.
花王 | 洗濯愛してる会 | 2019
In January 2020, right at the start of the new year, I got hit with a shock strong enough to make me want to restart this blog. Five of the hottest actors around — Matsuzaka Tori, Suda Masaki, Kaku Kento, Mamiya Shotaro, and Sugino Yosuke — talking about laundry with total seriousness for 60 seconds. It felt like I'd just watched two whole dramas.
キリン 午後の紅茶 | わたしらしいって、最強だ。夏 | 2019
This feels so now. Really now. Four high school girls from different schools and different backgrounds meet on social media and form a band. That kind of realness feels like it's bottled up the air of 2019.
日経電子版 | 見えてきた？ | 2019
Nikkei Digital Edition's "Did You See It?" series started in 2019, and it became a talking point for actor Sho Kiyohara's mysterious, repeated line "Ah, I see." This flea market app installment is a 15-second spot where a guy glances over at his girlfriend using a flea market app and, somehow, only he ends up nodding and saying "Ah, I see." Some have praised it for capturing something very relatable about young women today, but honestly, it wasn't easy to tell exactly what he was supposed to be "getting."
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.
CARLINGS | ADDRESS THE FUTURE | 2019
You buy clothes, wear them, take a photo, post it online. But what if those clothes never actually existed? In 2019, Norway's CARLINGS released the world's first fully digital clothing collection, and honestly, my first reaction was "wait, what?" But this campaign went on to win the first-ever Grand Prix in the Digital Craft category.
IKEA | THISABLES | 2019
Don't change the furniture—just add a part. That was all it took.
DOCONOMY | DO BLACK | 2019
A credit card stops working. Not because you spent too much. Because you emitted too much CO2. A card like that actually exists.
GSK GLAXOSMITHKLINE | BREATH OF LIFE | 2019
Blow on your phone, and a tree painted in ink wash grows before your eyes. It's beautiful, but it's actually a lung function test. Only 7% of COPD cases in China get diagnosed. Turning a life-or-death health check into a piece of traditional art is a brilliant idea.
APPLE | Apple at Work - The Underdogs | 2019
Three minutes. It's basically a short film. It's just about four unremarkable office workers trying to turn an idea into something real in two days, but you end up completely absorbed and forget you're even watching an Apple ad.
MICROSOFT | The Franchise Model | 2019
There was a site where you could customize your own Xbox controller. People loved designing them, but kept leaving without buying. McCann London found a trick there that boosted sales by 350%.
L’OREAL | THE NON-ISSUE | 2019
Both the beauty industry and fashion magazines have long acted as if women over 50 simply didn't exist. L'Oréal Paris and British Vogue set out to fill that gap.
TOYOTA | START YOUR IMPOSSIBLE | 2019
The car disappeared from Toyota's global campaign. What's shown instead: wheelchairs, robotic prosthetic legs, support robots. A car maker made an ad that doesn't show a car.
UNITED NATIONS | THE PEOPLE'S SEAT | 2019
The UN meeting room only had enough chairs for 193 countries. So they added a 194th chair. The one who sat in it wasn't a representative from any country — it was "people around the world."
MAKE SOMETHING WONDERFUL - APPLE | MAKE SOMETHING WONDERFUL / BEHIND THE MAC | 2019
Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, Paul McCartney — all of them shown quietly working away at a Mac. And woven in between them, with just as much weight, is the desk of someone nobody's ever heard of.
WILLIAM PATRICK CORGAN | Aeronaut VR | 2018
It's a music video, but you can stand right next to Billy Corgan. As he plays piano, the scenery shifts and the colors change around him, and before you know it, you feel like you're on a journey together.
カロリーメイト | 心の声 | 2018
I think it's fair to call this one a winter tradition by now. This is the fifth installment of CalorieMate's commercial series cheering on exam students. Another great one this year.
キリン 午後の紅茶 | あいたいって、あたためたいだ。18冬 | 2018
This series began in winter 2016, and apparently this is its conclusion. It's the kind of project where the casting alone practically guarantees success, but using the same actors across multiple years takes it even further. You can clearly see, right there on screen, what's been lost and what's been gained, and in that sense a different kind of charm emerges.
Joburg Ballet | Breaking Ballet | 2018
A lot of millennials saw ballet as old-fashioned. Swan Lake and Shakespeare are wonderful, sure, but to young people in Johannesburg, it felt like "an art form that has nothing to do with me." To flip that perception, a ballet company did something bold: it turned the trends on social media themselves into ballet.
BLINK TO SPEAK - | Blink To Speak | 2018
A language made for people who can only move their eyes. Even when ALS or a spinal injury takes away control of the rest of the body, the eyes keep moving until the very end. This gave those eyes words to speak with.
MONTEFIORE | CORAZON - GIVE YOUR HEART | 2018
Shoot a 48-minute film, then wrap up donor registration in just 15 seconds. That's what Montefiore Medical Center pulled off. Audiences leaving the theater held their phone to their chest, the poster woke up, and registration was done. It won the Grand Prix in the Health & Wellness category at Cannes in 2018.
TODAY@APPLE | Today at Apple | 2018
At Cannes 2018, what Apple won wasn't for advertising. It won the Grand Prix for store experience — an award earned by giving up on being a "place to sell."
NIKE | Nothing Beats a Londoner | 2018
Skepta shows up on screen, gets roasted by a kid, and walks off. The real stars aren't famous athletes — they're 258 unknown young people grinding it out on London's streets.
NIKE | BREAKING2 | 2018
Breaking two hours in the marathon. For that single goal, Nike spent three years. On May 6, 2017, three of the world's fastest runners gathered at an F1 racetrack in Italy.
JORDAN BRAND | A/R JORDAN | 2018
That dunk Jordan made in 1988 — you could summon it through your phone's camera on Snapchat. And you could buy the shoes right there on the spot, with delivery the same day. In 2018, one brand built that kind of experience.
GOOGLE | Know What Your Data Knows | 2018
In 2018, during a live NCAA basketball broadcast watched by 43 million people across the US, Google Cloud built and aired a commercial on the spot, shaped by how the game was actually unfolding. A commercial coming together in real time, right alongside the commentary—just hearing about it is stressful enough.
ALDI | Fresh Prints | 2018
I always thought "real-time" was a digital-only thing. But at 7am, vegetables wrapped in newspaper were delivered to homes across Spain, wrapped together with that very day's latest news. A comeback move where print media proved it could capture "freshness in this exact moment."
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.
CARREFOUR | Black Supermarket | 2018
This isn't a supermarket ad. It's a lesson in how to pick a fight with the law.
EDEKA | THE MOST GERMAN SUPERMARKET | 2018
One day you walk into your usual supermarket and the shelves are completely empty. No coffee, no chocolate, no fruit, no juice. You'd think something had gone wrong.