Emotion
472 articles
東京ディズニーリゾート | Where dreams come true 夢はつづく | 2015
You see a lot of commercials these days that fast-forward through someone's whole life, but this Disney one really stuck with me. It's all animation, and the fact that it manages to capture one woman's entire life in just 30 seconds is enough to bring tears to your eyes.
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.
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.
Honda | 負けるもんか | 2015
"Effort doesn't pay off. Dreams don't come true. So what?" I still remember how many people this corporate ad moved when it came out. In just 60 seconds, it lines up generations of Honda cars and motorcycles at Twin Ring Motegi, and through them, the spirit of Soichiro Honda comes through as one powerful message.
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.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL | FREEDOM CANDLES | 2014
It looks like an ordinary candle, but keep it burning and a small human figure starts to appear from within. The outside is shaped like a person, and as the wax melts away, another figure that was trapped inside is slowly revealed.
DU | TOO DEPRESSING (Cinema Tuesdays) | 2014
Watching a movie alone, in a theater, and it's a hopeless tragedy on top of that. Is there a crueler punishment? The first time I saw this ad from du, I laughed so hard I cried. I couldn't believe something this dark actually got approved.
BERGEN INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL BRAND CAMPAIGN | Brand Campaign | 2014
A festival logo built out of "music". And it went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes. This is the story of Norway's Bergen International Festival, from 2014.
COCA COLA LIFE | Parents | 2014
This is a parenting ad with zero soft focus and zero shots of sleeping babies. It's a 60-second film that opens with a father writhing in pain after stepping on a toy — and it won Gold at Cannes.
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.
キリン のどごし〈生〉 | 夢のドリーム プロ野球 | 2014
I cried watching the making-of for the baseball edition. The Jackie Chan edition was fantastic too, but this one really gets me. Watching a celebrity take on something huge is moving, but somehow it's even more moving when ordinary people chase an ordinary—or maybe slightly oversized—dream. I think it's because the people at the center feel so much closer to us.
COCA COLA | A Rainbow for the Rainbow Nation | 2014
In 2014, South Africa marked 20 years since the end of apartheid. Coca-Cola made a rainbow. Not as a figure of speech — they made an actual rainbow appear in the sky over Johannesburg.
リクルートホールディングス | すべての人生が、すばらしい。 | 2014
A commercial that declares life is a marathon—then immediately sets out to demolish its own metaphor.
江崎グリコ | smile.Glico | 2014
Satoshi Tsumabuki, dressed up as a clown, goes around turning grumpy people from all over the world into smiling ones, one after another. Because it's a long-form video, watching it leaves you with a feeling like you just finished a movie.
MUSIC ALBUM - JOHN FRUSCIANTE | SAT-JF14 | 2014
They launched an album into space, so you could only listen to it the moment the satellite passed over your head. Someone actually did this for real. It's the story behind former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante's solo album "ENCLOSURE."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
METROPOLE ORKEST | METROPOLE TWEETPHONY | 2013
A Dutch orchestra on the verge of disappearing due to budget cuts had a full 52-piece orchestra perform a song live that was composed entirely on Twitter. You didn't need an instrument, just 140 characters.
CAPE TOWN TOURISM | SEND YOUR FACEBOOK PROFILE TO CAPE TOWN | 2013
"If we can't send everyone to Cape Town, let's send their Facebook profiles instead." In 2013, someone actually turned that idea into an app.
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.
日清カップヌードル | SURVIVE! | 2013
In 2013, Nissin went and did something wild. A young office worker in a suit of armor charges into a Western army, shouting "Nice to meet you!" before getting blown away by a cannon. A job-hunting student gets grilled by a polar bear interviewer in a blizzard, and at the beach, a monstrous shark attacks people, demanding "likes!" It's completely absurd, yet it captures the mood of 2013 exactly as it was.
GEOX AMPHIBIOX | THE ULTIMATE WATERPROOF TEST (7 Days of Rain) | 2013
They built three artificial rain clouds and kept one man soaked in rain for seven days straight. The location: the middle of Barcelona. Even though the sky was clear.
KBC | THE GAP IN THE MARKET | 2013
In 2013, the number of people starting businesses in Belgium had dropped 14% from the year before. Banks were reluctant to lend money, and had basically become the "enemy" of anyone with a dream. KBC Bank set out to flip that around.
ADIDAS | WINDOW SHOPPING | 2013
11pm, an empty street. A blue sneaker in the shop window catches your eye. But the store's closed—normally that's the end of the story. Adidas made it so you could shop just by touching that window.
FRIENDS OF THE EARTH | TREE CONCERT | 2013
Who would believe a tree could hold a concert? But it really happened in a park in Berlin. One night, a 100-year-old chestnut tree became a musician.
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.
WWF | THE ANT RALLY | 2013
Bugs staging a protest. That ridiculous idea won the Grand Prix at Cannes Lions.
THE GUARDIAN | Three Little Pigs | 2012
What happens if you drop the fairy tale of the Three Little Pigs into today's news environment? The Guardian turned its answer into a two-minute film. It gives me chills every time I watch it.
AXE “EXCITE” | Excite - Even Angels Will Fall | 2012
An angel descends from the sky. Beautiful angels in white robes and halos walk through a small town, and in front of one man, they smash their halos. "AXE can make even angels fall." This is the work that won the Grand Prix in the Creative Effectiveness category at Cannes Lions in 2012.
GO OUTSIDE MAGAZINE | REPELLENT RADIO | 2012
A radio station in São Paulo secretly mixed a 15kHz tone into its music programming from 6 to 8pm. Humans can't hear it. But mosquitoes can. Since it mimics the sound of a dragonfly's wings—a mosquito's natural predator—the mosquitoes flee. Just by having the radio on, you get bug protection.
BAND-AID | MAGIC VISION | 2012
The instant a kid starts to cry from a scrape, Kermit pops up right on the Band-Aid and starts singing. Just hold up your phone, and an ordinary bandage turns into a tiny stage.
UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON | UNHATE | 2012
Obama and Hu Jintao. Netanyahu and Abbas. The Pope and an imam, kissing. The moment these posters went up in cities, the world reacted. Within hours the Vatican was furious, calling it a "grave lack of respect," and the poster of the Pope was taken down. That reaction was probably part of the plan all along.
COCA-COLA | Polar Bowl | 2012
On Super Bowl night, more than 700,000 people watched polar bears instead of the actual game. Isn't that wild?
読売新聞 | 僕の走れなかった道 | 2012
"When we were kids, everyone wanted to be an athlete." That opening line feels like it could spark real debate. But Yomiuri Shimbun ran with it anyway. And that's exactly where the strength of this campaign lies.
ASOS | Urban Tour | 2012
Click on a dancer, and everyone around them freezes while that one person keeps moving. Then you can buy what they're wearing. Incredibly simple, and incredibly new for its time.
MINISTRY OF TOURISM GOVT. OF INDIA | THE HINGLISH PROJECT | 2012
In India, mixing Hindi and English together into "Hinglish" is just a normal part of how people talk. So someone decided to turn that into a font.
ETERNA CADENCIA | THE BOOK THAT CAN'T WAIT | 2012
There's a book that starts erasing itself the moment you open it. Printed with a special ink that fades after a few months of exposure to light and air, this is a book you simply have to read.
CHIPOTLE | Back to the Start | 2012
For 2 minutes and 20 seconds, it just talks about farms. No burritos, no smiling staff, not even the product name shows up. For a fast food ad, that's incredibly strange. And yet it ended up winning two Grand Prix at Cannes.
TOYOTA | BACKSEAT DRIVER | 2012
A kid in the backseat who used to just whine "are we there yet?" now grips their own steering wheel inside an iPhone app that's linked by GPS to the real car. Boring travel time spent just tracing a parent's driving got turned into a whole game.
NIKE | I AM PLAYR | 2012
There's a game where you live a footballer's life in the first person. Nike was woven into that story as if it were simply part of life — and over 400,000 pairs of boots got sold inside the game. It never feels like advertising, but that's exactly what it is.
DORITOS | DIPS DESPERADO | 2012
Only 1 in 10 people in the UK were dipping their chips. To move that number, AMV BBDO invented a legendary Mexican who never existed.
SEAWEED | DESIGN NORI | 2012
Using a laser cutter to etch patterns into sheets of nori that hadn't changed in 500 years. The idea of designing the product itself, not the package, was a total blind spot.
GOOGLE | Voice Search | 2012
In 2012, more than 150 oddly spelled billboards popped up on the streets of London. Outside subway stations, mysterious strings of letters that looked like station names. Outside a stadium, something like "ley-tist-skohrz." Read them out loud, and suddenly they make sense. This was an ad for Google's voice search.
BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO BANK | THE MOST POPULAR SONG | 2012
Puerto Rico's biggest hit song was a tune called "I Don't Do Anything" — a song that nationally celebrated not working. This campaign got the very people singing it to rewrite it. That bold move brought Puerto Rico its first-ever Cannes Grand Prix.
NOKIA | MYSTERY AD | 2012
You're sure you're using an iPhone, but suddenly the screen turns into Windows Phone. You're sure you're on Android, but somehow it's now Nokia's interface. This "impossible experience" was built as an actual mobile ad format. Winning Gold at Cannes Lions Mobile in 2012, this trick stands out both for the boldness of targeting competitors' users directly, and for the technical precision needed to pull it off.