Emotion
473 articles
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
WWF | EARTH HOUR | 2009
Just turn off the lights for one hour. That's it—and with that simple act, hundreds of millions of people around the world made a statement about climate change. It's a simple but powerful campaign. Earth Hour started in Sydney in 2007, and by 2009 it had grown to an incredible scale.
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.
MICROSOFT | Halo 3: Believe - John 117 Monument | 2008
It's an ad for a video game, but no game footage shows up anywhere in it. All you get is an old soldier recalling memories of war, and a massive 110-square-meter battlefield diorama. This ad treated Halo 3 like it was a real war.
THE TIMES OF INDIA NEWSPAPER | Lead India | 2008
At Cannes Lions 2008, India's first-ever Grand Prix didn't go to a drink or a car, but to a newspaper. And it wasn't just an ad campaign, either. It was the story of a newspaper that seriously tried to raise up the country's next leaders.
ホンダ | オデッセイ「いいクルマが好きだ。男ですから。」 | 2008
George Clooney just walks coolly through the streets of Milan. That's all it is, and yet it's absolutely captivating.
Nike | Take It To The Next Level | 2008
This film traces a soccer player's path from amateur beginnings all the way to the national team, all seen through his own eyes. Honestly, the idea of doing it in first-person view is something you might think of on your own. But the scale here is different, and so is the money behind it. The sheer luxury of lining up Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Wayne Rooney, Cesc Fàbregas, Zlatan Ibrahimović, and even manager Arsène Wenger. Of course it was directed by Guy Ritchie. Just picturing it is fun.
UNIQLO | UNIQLOCK | 2008
In 2007, the clock that kept more people awake than any other was born. UNIQLOCK is a blog widget that marks time with music and dance. Once you stick it on the side of your blog, you'll find yourself watching the five-second changes for ten minutes before you know it.
SONY | REC YOU | 2008
In 2008, SONY launched "REC YOU," a campaign built around a wild experience: send in a photo of your face, and it starts singing along to music. The submitted faces flooded banner ads, street-side screens, TV shows, and blog widgets everywhere. Digital technology and cross-media power combined as a trio to show off "the new world of Walkman."
ABSOLUT VODKA | ABSOLUT MACHINES | 2008
In 2008, robot orchestras showed up in Stockholm and New York. Someone, somewhere in the world, would send a short melody over the web, and the machines would "interpret" it on the spot, turning it into a three-minute song. It was a wonderfully romantic experiment cooked up by Absolut.
HEWLET-PACKARD | THE NATIONAL GALLERY GRAND TOUR | 2008
Instead of waiting for people to come to it, the museum sent its paintings out into the city. It's a simple idea, but nobody had done it before HP and the National Gallery did.
MINI | BOOST | 2008
In 2008, MINI won gold with a piece called "BOOST." Just from the title, you get the sense it's going to give you a push forward. But what it actually involved, I still don't quite know.
WWF | EARTH HOUR | 2007
On March 31, 2007, 2.2 million people in Sydney switched off their lights all at once — a way of showing that they were serious about climate change, at a time when skepticism still hung in the air. This single hour of action has since spread around the world, 20 years on.
UNICEF | TAP PROJECT | 2007
Esquire magazine challenged the creatives it named to its "Best and Brightest" list to build a brand using just one page of the magazine. What David Droga came up with wasn't an ad at all — it was a mechanism that changed the world.
AXE | AXE 3 | 2007
In 2007, an ad out of Buenos Aires won the Grand Prix at Cannes. In the deodorant market, it pulled off something that shouldn't have been possible: 1+1=3.
DIESEL | HEIDIES 15 MB OF FAME | 2007
In 2007, if you opened diesel.com, instead of the usual homepage you saw a hotel room. Two women were holding an employee hostage, shouting that they wanted to be famous. This went on for five days.
GALITIA BANK | Lopetegui Deposit | 2007
Footage of former goalkeeper Lopetegui collapsing live on air somehow became a bank ad. And the fixed deposit product was even named the "Lopetegui Deposit." I just love this kind of thinking.
資生堂 | あたらしい私になって | 2006
She just got dumped. She's on the verge of tears. But then she washes her face, pats on some lotion—and little by little, she starts to feel like she can look forward again. This corporate commercial that Shiseido put out into the world in the summer of 2006 spoke about the value of makeup not from the "makeup" side, but from the "skincare" side. Anri Kumaki's simple, warm voice was as delicate and beautiful as the footage itself.
LYNX | LYNXjet | 2006
In 2005, a brand-new airline appeared in Australia. Underneath it all, it was really an ad for deodorant. But they built it so seriously that real flight attendants from an actual airline ended up striking over it.
ソフトバンク | ブラッド・ピット&キャメロン・ディアス シリーズ | 2006
I remember the first time I saw this on TV, I actually said "whoa" out loud. You could feel the sense that SoftBank had bought Vodafone and was coming out swinging at the market, and then boom, there's Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz. It's a commercial that's purely about looking cool, nothing else. And it taught me that sometimes just being cool is enough.
CAMPARI | RED PASSION DISTRICT | 2006
In 2006, in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires, an entire neighborhood turned red overnight. CAMPARI's "RED PASSION" wasn't a billboard or a poster—it wrapped around building walls, shop windows, and whole streets, pulling every passerby into the brand experience.
MINI | MINI DOMINATRIX | 2006
Winter in Canada, 2006. Anyone who visited MINI's website was greeted by a dominatrix in leather. Click on each part of the car, and she'd "discipline" the MINI with a whip or a paddle while explaining its winter safety features. Kinky, bold, and impossible to forget.
ARISTON AQUALTIS | UNDERWATER WORLD | 2006
A washing machine ad won the Gold Lion at Cannes and ended up in the Louvre. A washing machine ad.
HONDA | IMPOSSIBLE DREAM | 2006
This two-minute ad aired in the UK on December 2, 2005 (12/2). Set to Andy Williams's "The Impossible Dream," a man in a racing suit moves from one historic Honda vehicle to the next. The sequence gets wonderfully wild—he jumps off a waterfall in a boat and comes floating back out of the mist in a hot air balloon. It all ends with Garrison Keillor's voice saying "I couldn't have put it better myself," wrapping up a perfect two minutes.
VICTORIA BITTER | BOONIE | 2006
Buy a VB and you'd get a miniature figure of a real former cricket player delivered to your home, one that would start talking along with the TV broadcast. And they made 200,000 of them.
VIRGIN | 5 CENT | 2005
Australia, 2005. Just hearing the name VIRGIN gives you a feeling something's about to happen. "5 CENT," made by HOST SYDNEY, won the Grand Prix. The strength of a price, conveyed through the title alone.
VOLVO | LIFE ON BOARD PROJECT | 2005
In 2005, Volvo made a car ad that stopped talking about cars. Just by letting people talk about their lives, it became the first ad ever to win a Titanium Lion at Cannes.
ADIDAS | UNSTOPPABLE | 2005
A miniature army swarms him with helicopters and Hummers, but Tracy McGrady never stops dribbling. It's 60 seconds of the most ridiculous, most amazing footage you'll see.
ADIDAS | Impossible is Nothing - The Long Run | 2004
In old footage from 1974, Muhammad Ali is running in Zaire. Beckham and Zidane run alongside him, catching up. Today's athletes are joining footage that should have been long dead.
PLAYSTATION 2 | Fun, Anyone? | 2004
Not a single second of gameplay footage appears. And yet I've never seen an ad that feels this much like a game. In Brazil, 1,500 people built a human mountain, climbing it over and over, only to be knocked down again and again. At the end, just one line appears: "Fun, Anyone?"
NIKE | San Silvestre Vallecana 2003 | 2004
It starts with a news story that sounds made up: lightning strikes the statue of a bear on Madrid's coat of arms, and it comes to life and runs off. That's how this campaign begins—and it ended up winning Spain's first Cannes Lions Grand Prix in Digital.
ADIDAS | VERTICAL FOOTBALL | 2004
They hung people on the wall of a building and had them play soccer. That alone is enough. Just imagining the faces of the people looking up, I can't stop grinning.
SAAB | INFINITE DRIVE | 2004
In 2004, back when internet connections were still slow, there was an ad that tried to create a drive that never ends.
ADIDAS | WAKE UP CALL | 2004
2004. The year Adidas was shaking up the world with "Impossible Is Nothing," another wake-up call quietly came out of 180 Amsterdam. Its title: "WAKE UP CALL." I think it really was an ad meant to wake something up.
ネスカフェ | 朝のリレー | 2003
There's something striking about the simple fact that "somewhere on this planet, morning is always just beginning." It's obvious when you think about it, but it still catches you off guard - and that small realization, carried by the power of a poem, sweeps the viewer far, far away in an instant.
SK TELECOM | BE THE REDS CAMPAIGN IN 2002 FIFA WORLD CUP | 2003
In 2002, the entire country of South Korea turned red. This ad gave birth to the phrase "Be the Reds," which was printed on T-shirts, worn by 7 million people in the streets, and sparked a historic wave of fan culture that drew in 20% of the population.
サントリー ペプシコーラ | イチローダンス | 2002
The finest product of Japanese baseball crossed the ocean in 2001, and the next year he was first in All-Star voting, won the batting title, the stolen base title, and MVP—so perfect it was almost anticlimactic. Riding that wave of success, this commercial started airing in February 2002. Brian Setzer's rockabilly blasts at full volume while Americans dance wildly, imitating Ichiro's famous batting routine.
NIKE | TAG (Play campaign) | 2002
In a subway station, a man being chased dives onto a train. The doors close right on his pursuer's arm, just out of reach. Before you know it, the whole city seems to be caught up in one game of tag.
MAGNUM ICE CREAM | 7 DEADLY SINS: GIVE IN TO IT | 2002
Naming your ice cream after a sin, then boldly telling people to give in to it. This bold move by MAGNUM in 2002 was a massive hit in Australia, and it spread around the world.
MILKO | MUSIC MACHINE | 2001
Back in 2000, the web was still a quiet place. Most campaign sites were static HTML pages, and banners were just animated GIFs. Into that world, the Swedish dairy brand MILKO let loose a dancing cow.
SPECIAL OLYMPICS | DIFFERENT | 2001
The year was 2001. That year, Special Olympics put forward a single word: "DIFFERENT." This ad went on to win gold.
ジョージア | 明日があるさ | 2000
On 8/26, 2000, Coca-Cola Japan's canned coffee brand GEORGIA used Kyu Sakamoto's song "There's Always Tomorrow" in a commercial, and it became an unprecedented revival hit. Both the commercial and the campaign turned into a huge talking point. When it was later made into a TV drama, the first episode pulled a 29.0% rating — the seventh-highest debut rating ever for a commercial broadcaster's drama series, and the highest ever on Nippon TV. That's how big this was.
日本テレビ | 日テレ営業中 | 1999
I remember watching this with a pretty detached, cynical eye, thinking: well, it's a TV station, so naturally it's open 24 hours. But this stunt with Hama-chan turned out to be amazing.
FRANCE TELECOM | CUSTOMS | 1999
An ad made by France Telecom ahead of the 1998 World Cup. Set at a border customs checkpoint, it follows officers smuggling a soccer ball, with a "Goal!" ringing out over the phone. Football gets people talking.