Emotion
472 articles
GOOGLE | All Is Not Lost | 2012
A browser window splits into 12 pieces, each one moving on its own, somehow coming together into a single dance. And at the end, it spells out the words you typed, using its feet. When I saw this in 2011, I literally shivered, thinking, "wait, the internet can still do this?"
NIKE+ | FuelBand | 2012
This isn't an ad. But an ad agency made it. That contradiction is exactly why it won two Grand Prix at Cannes.
CARLTON DRAUGHT | Slow Mo | 2011
Set to Puccini's grand opera, the ad shows men's ridiculous moments at the pub unfolding in extreme slow motion. A peanut flies out of someone's mouth. A backside lands on a bar stool. It's all so beautiful that you can't stop laughing.
サントリー | 歌のリレー | 2011
I used to think there was no way a commercial could make someone cry. But I've had a few such moments in my life, and this was one of them.
Heineken | Star Player | 2011
72% of Champions League fans watch at home, alone. Heineken and AKQA turned that loneliness into competition. Watching TV while predicting the next play on your phone — "Star Player" was the world's first live dual-screen football game.
MINISTRE DE LA DEFENSE | OPERATION CHRISTMAS | 2011
In December 2010, deep in the Colombian jungle, a giant tree turned into a Christmas tree. When guerrilla soldiers walked by, motion sensors lit up 2,000 lights, and a message appeared on a banner next to it: "If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home. Demobilize. At Christmas, everything is possible." This is one of the most urgent campaigns ever staged by an ad agency.
AXE | DISTANCE (Premature Perspiration) | 2011
Argentina, 2011. This is from the era when AXE was still going all-in on laughs as a "weapon for getting the girl." The title is "DISTANCE," but the campaign as a whole was called "Premature Perspiration." Just the nuance of that phrase is enough to make you grin.
BING/JAY-Z | DECODE JAY-Z | 2011
In 2010, Bing was completely overshadowed by Google when it pulled off one of the biggest treasure hunts ever, scattering over 300 pages of Jay-Z's memoir across the globe. And the way they "scattered" them was wild: not just billboards, but the bottom of a pool in Miami, a burger wrapper, the lining of a Gucci jacket, a bronze plaque embedded in a Brooklyn housing project, a rooftop in New Orleans, even a pool table at the 40/40 Club.
KYUSHU RAILWAY COMPANY | THE 250KM WAVE（祝！九州） | 2011
On February 20, 2011 (2/20), from the window of a shinkansen running 250km from Kagoshima-Chuo Station to Hakata Station, a wild plan was carried out: film 15,000 people gathered along the route and turn it into a commercial. One shot, no retakes. If it rained, it was over. If no one showed up, it was over. But all that worry was blown away on the day all of Kyushu waved.
PUMA | AFTER HOURS ATHLETE | 2011
"A 5 AM taxi is way more fun than a 5 AM run" — with this one line, PUMA rewrote the definition of sport in 2011. Pool, darts, karaoke. No sweat required, no records needed. This ad declared that the stamina to party all night long is athletic spirit itself.
UNIQLO | LUCKY LINE | 2011
In 2011, UNIQLO brought the "line" online. Turning that familiar sight of people queuing outside stores from 6 a.m. into a virtual experience on Twitter and Facebook was, at the time, an unheard-of move.
OFFF INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL | 2010 OPEN TITLES | 2011
Fragments of living creatures mix together, and new species are born. In a strange space that's neither underwater nor airborne, mechanical elements and organic textures intertwine as the names of 45 speakers rise into view. It's an unforgettable piece of film that marked the debut of The Mill NY's design department.
DURAND ACADEMY | Shine a Light on Opportunity | 2011
A public primary school in London beat out the United Nations and Renault to win Gold in the PR category at Cannes. Just the idea of a school's PR effort taking down national institutions is fascinating on its own.
SCOPE | SEE THE PERSON | 2011
In the darkness, rock music rings out. Then the lights come up on the members of a six-person band, Rudely Interrupted. The music tells you first, before anything else, that five of them are living with disability.
ESTRELLA TOYS | COME BACK FERRORAMA | 2011
13 years after it was discontinued, the company's own president threw out a challenge in a video: bring the toy train's last 20km along the pilgrimage route to life using nothing but toy tracks, and we'll bring the product back. I love that kind of reckless dare.
Google Chrome | The Web Is What You Make of It | 2011
On 5/21/2011, this commercial aired live during Saturday Night Live. Lady Gaga running across the Brooklyn Bridge, fans dancing and singing their hearts out, filling the whole screen. That raw energy grabbed me and wouldn't let go.
HEINEKEN | THE ENTRANCE | 2011
The main character walks into a party — that's it, and somehow it holds your attention for three full minutes. In 2011, this felt like the moment beer ads leveled up.
COSMOPOLITAN OF LAS VEGAS | Hotel Digital Experience | 2011
In a Las Vegas hotel lobby stand eight LED columns running floor to ceiling. What plays on them isn't ads, it's art. This is the project that won the Grand Prix in the Design category at the 2011 Cannes Lions.
CHEVROLET | Taxi Drivers' University | 2011
There are moments when an ad stops being an ad. This campaign is exactly that. Chevrolet in Colombia built a real university for taxi drivers.
旭化成ホームズ | 考えよう。答はある。 | 2011
This copy opens with a quiet, measured voice: "I know that if I go further out, I could have a bit more land. But still, I think I'll live in the city." I find myself stopping on these words again and again.
TOYOTA PRIUS | PRIUS GOES PLURAL | 2011
If there are more Priuses on the road, what do you call them? That question alone became an entire campaign. The answer wasn't found in the car—it was found in grammar.
NIKE | CITY CUP | 2011
Mexico, 2011. NIKE turned an entire city into its playing field with a campaign called "CITY CUP."
AXE | PREMATURE PERSPIRATION | 2011
When I saw this Argentine ad from 2011, I couldn't help but laugh. I mean, "premature perspiration" — even the name is already a metaphor for that other thing.
IGGY POP & ORCON BROADBAND | Together Incredible | 2010
In 2010, Orcon, a small internet provider in New Zealand, connected punk icon Iggy Pop with nine amateur musicians from around the country over ordinary home broadband to re-record "The Passenger." This wonderfully absurd product demo won the Grand Prix in the Direct category at Cannes Lions.
ZOO ANTWERP | BABY ELEPHANT | 2010
An elephant's pregnancy, watched by an entire country. The ultrasound photos, the contractions, the moment of birth. This isn't really an ad—it's the story of everyone coming together to witness a new life.
TOYOTA | IQ FONT | 2010
A car writes letters with its tire tracks. And then those letters become an actual downloadable font. Launched from Belgium out to the world in 2010, this project showed people something they'd never seen before.
IKEA | Interactive Catalogue | 2010
In 2010, just a few years after the iPhone came out, IKEA had already built an app that let you place furniture in your room through your camera. This was years before AR became a trend.
NEW ZEALAND BOOK COUNCIL | GOING WEST | 2010
Just by cutting paper, a forest rises and a river starts to flow. No CGI, no compositing — a "book that truly moves," made entirely by hand over eight months.
Nike | Write The Future | 2010
I just watched a three-minute film. A single moment at the World Cup can turn into glory, or it can turn into ruin. The moment they showed Rooney gone to fat, unshaven, and living in a caravan, I nearly fell out of my chair.
HBO | Imagine | 2010
A mystery about a teddy bear plays out on a giant cube-shaped screen on a street corner, showing four different angles at once. One truth starts to look like entirely different stories, just depending on where you're standing.
BOONEOAKLEY | BOONEOAKLEY WEBSITE | 2010
There's an agency that built its company website without a single page of its own. BooneOakley put together its entire site using nothing but YouTube videos.
CADBURY | IT'S NO PICNIC | 2010
Turn on the TV in Australia in 2010 and you might catch a 30-second ad of an ordinary person desperately stuffing a chocolate bar into their mouth. A different person, a different face, every time. Over 200 ads ran, and not one was the same as another.
BBC | Winter Olympics 2010 | 2010
I never expected an Olympics promo to pull from Inuit mythology for the Vancouver Games. But somehow, it fits perfectly.
au | LISMO Fes! | 2010
Around the 0:22 mark, there's a moment where Haruna Kawaguchi opens her mouth wide, and it's unbelievably cute. Her charm from back when she wasn't as famous as she is now is all packed into that single instant. Whoever on the crew captured that moment did an amazing job.
CANON | EOS PHOTOCHAINS | 2010
In 2010, Canon Australia turned photography, a solo hobby, into a game that connects people. This campaign won the Grand Prix in the Media category at Cannes Lions.
P&G | Flora | 2009
Chris Cunningham shoots a perfume ad. The man behind the nightmarish music videos for Aphex Twin and Björk takes on Gucci's new fragrance.
HBO | Big Love Audio Mural Installations (Wall of Secrets) | 2009
Painted on a city wall, passersby had real headphone jacks embedded right in their heads. Plug in, and you'd hear that one person's own "secret" whispered in your ear.
OBAMA/BIDEN 2008 | OBAMA FOR AMERICA | 2009
At Cannes in 2009, the jury did something no political campaign had ever had done to it before. They gave it two Grand Prix at once, in Titanium and Integrated, and both decisions were unanimous.
NIKE | PAPER BATTLEFIELD | 2009
This campaign won the Grand Prix in the Design category at Cannes in 2009, and even looking at it now, it's absolutely thrilling. Using silkscreen printing, a technique that goes back to the 10th century, the players themselves made their own posters. That process itself embodied the very essence of competition.
PASCALL | WHEN WILL THE FRUIT BURST | 2009
A giant strawberry-shaped balloon slowly, slowly inflates in the middle of the city. Right beside it, a needle stands ready and waiting. Nobody knows when it will burst. The only thing that's certain is that when it does, thousands of fruit candies will rain down on the street.
GLOBO TV | One Thousand Casmurros | 2009
Split a book into 1,000 pieces and have 1,000 people read it. Who even comes up with that?
HAAGEN DAZS | HD loves HB (Honey, Let's Lick the Problem) | 2009
In 2009, honeybees were mysteriously vanishing across America. The reason Haagen-Dazs got involved was simple: without bees, it couldn't make four out of ten of its flavors.
BURGER KING | WHOPPER SACRIFICE | 2009
Delete ten friends on Facebook and you get a free Whopper. The person you deleted gets a notification saying 'You have chosen a Whopper over your friend.' It was a bomb CP+B dropped in 2009.
WARNER BROS | WHY SO SERIOUS? | 2009
This is the story of a movie promotion that turned into a city-wide game lasting 15 months. From 2007 to 2008, fans around the world became "residents of Gotham City," solving puzzles, making phone calls, and picking up cakes.
HYUNDAI | ASSURANCE | 2009
It was 2009, right after the Lehman shock. In a time when nobody was buying cars, Hyundai said something strange: "If you lose your job within a year, you can give this car back." It was a promise nobody in the industry had ever made.
ソフトバンク | SMAP大移動 | 2009
Sixty seconds, almost entirely one continuous shot. Actually, it's so good you can't even figure out why they bothered cutting away for the scene where the Father Dog goes outside. The tension comes through the screen and hits you directly, on top of being overwhelmingly entertaining.
T MOBILE | Life's for Sharing - Dance | 2009
2009, London's Liverpool Street Station. In the middle of the rush hour crowd, one commuter started dancing. Then another, then another. Before anyone knew it, 350 people were dancing their hearts out to "Shout" in a full-blown celebration.
AEG | THE WORLD IS NOISY ENOUGH | 2009
In 2009, a slightly unusual billboard showed up on the streets of London. Advertising AEG's quiet washing machines, this billboard didn't just display an ad—it measured the surrounding noise levels in real time and kept sending that data to a website.