Emotion
72 articles
COINBASE | Your Way Out | 2026
During the live broadcast of the Academy Awards, the screen was interrupted by a blocky, low-poly town. As NPCs wander back and forth, one man struggles to break free from the system and runs toward reality. This has zero CGI. It's all live action.
CARITAS | VEHICLE OF HOPE | 2026
They turned the Pope's official car into a mobile clinic for children in Gaza. And it took not one but two popes to say yes. Has any other ad ever cast actual popes—plural—in its campaign?
RAINBOW LOBSTER MEXICO | 600K Network | 2026
600,000 people scanned a QR code with their phones and exposed fraud in a presidential election. This wasn't really an ad—it was a tool for revolution.
AnNahar (Lebanon newspaper) | Active Journalism | 2025
Lebanon is a country that failed to choose a president 14 times in two years. So a long-established newspaper took action. It put forward an AI, trained on 90 years of its own articles, as a presidential candidate.
Apple TV+ | Severance Grand Central Activation | 2025
In January 2025, a glass box appeared at Grand Central Terminal. Inside were the cast of Severance. Right in the middle of rush-hour commuting, the show's office had suddenly materialized in real life.
HYUNDAI | TREE CORRESPONDENTS | 2025
Giving trees a voice sounds like a clever idea right off the bat. But what they actually did was the opposite: they simply made it possible for humans to hear what trees were already saying. Deforestation is one of the causes of global warming, yet it only gets 5% of climate coverage. So they made trees into "correspondents."
SICKKIDS FOUNDATION | THE COUNT | 2025
It's a film celebrating a 150th anniversary, but what you see isn't the hospital's history—it's kids running with everything they've got. What's being celebrated isn't the past, it's the next birthday.
UN WOMEN | Child Wedding Cards | 2024
A budget under $1,500. No AI. No celebrities. No special effects. Just wedding invitations drawn by girls aged 5 to 15. They sent them to members of parliament—and the law changed.
SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE | Play It Safe | 2024
This isn't an ad for condoms. It's a movie made for the Sydney Opera House's 50th anniversary. The title is "Play It Safe," and the lyrics Tim Minchin sings are all about "don't take risks, let's play it safe" — yet the footage thoroughly celebrates "dangerous creativity." That irony works incredibly well.
RUH FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIP | The National Sport of Kazakhstan | 2024
A ring where men and women fight each other? Unthinkable, the men raged. But inside their own homes, they said nothing. RUH Fighting Championship exposed that silence.
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.
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.
森ビル | DESIGNING TOKYO | 2022
In two minutes and five seconds, it travels back through 58 years. From Nishi-Shimbashi in 1956 to Toranomon Hills in 2014, six Mori Building projects are stitched together as if in a single continuous shot. Sayoko Yamaguchi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takashi Murakami all drift onto the screen looking just as they did at the time. At some point you stop caring whether it's CG or real footage.
HUMANE SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL | SAVE RALPH | 2022
Ralph the rabbit can't see out of one eye. He's deaf in one ear. His back is scarred with chemical burns. And yet he talks proudly about his job as a "tester." This four-minute stop-motion film has been watched more than 150 million times around the world — and it moved Mexico to act.
サントリーホールディングス | BOSS|ゴジラ『青き日の衝撃』篇 | 2022
Using about 2,500 dominoes, this ad tells the whole story behind the birth of the monster movie "Godzilla." Before any explanation, just watch the dominoes fall.
BACK MARKET | HACK MARKET | 2022
Inside an Apple Store, using AirDrop, sending a message to someone about to buy an Apple product: "You can get that cheaper at our place." It's a little crazy (in the best way).
EPIC GAMES | ASTRONOMICAL | 2020
April 2020. The world was still stuck at home. Travis Scott grew to giant size and danced his way across Fortnite's island, trampling everything in his path. 12.3 million people watched at the same time, and 27.7 million joined in over five days—the biggest live event in gaming history.
PERNOD RICARD | THE TIME WE HAVE LEFT | 2020
Have you ever calculated how many days you actually have left with someone you love? It's not a reality anyone wants to know. But Ruavieja turned it into a number using an algorithm—and ended up changing people's behavior in the process.
UNITED4RESCUE | DROWNED REQUIEM | 2020
Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" plays as a requiem on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. A symbol of Europe rings out over the graves of refugees. In 2020, while everyone's attention was on COVID and Trump, people were still drowning at sea. A German citizens' group sank the song Europe holds dearest into the ocean.
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.
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.
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.
JOHNSON & JOHNSON | 5B | 2019
A 94-minute documentary won the Grand Prix in the Entertainment category at Cannes Lions, an advertising award. What's more, it had an official screening at the Cannes Film Festival and got a theatrical release in more than 100 theaters across the US. A brand made it, but it ended up working as an actual film.
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.
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.
KPN | EVERT_45 | 2018
What if a boy living in 1945 had filmed vlogs just like kids do today? KPN actually turned that idea into real posts on YouTube and Instagram.
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.
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.
TRANSPORT ACCIDENT COMMISSION VICTORIA | MEET GRAHAM | 2017
Grotesque, strange, and impossible to look away from. Graham is the only human being ever designed purely to survive on the road. No neck, a thickened skull, twelve airbag-like nipples across his chest, lumpy skin. The moment you see him, you flinch. But buried inside that flinch is a message that really matters.
BURGER KING | Google Home of The Whopper | 2017
A single 15-second ad caused chaos in living rooms around the world just hours after it aired. The moment the employee on screen said "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?", viewers' Google Home devices started talking back on their own. Google was furious, Wikipedia got hit hard, and public opinion split right down the middle. The result: the Grand Prix in the Direct category at Cannes Lions. Nobody had seen anything like it before.
BJÖRK | NOTGET VR | 2017
Say "a music video in VR" and you probably picture something — but this probably goes beyond it. Six minutes where the experience changes every single time you watch. This piece won the Grand Prix in the Digital Craft category at Cannes Lions 2017.
JAMIE XX | GOSH | 2017
This isn't CGI. It's all real. Four hundred boys with hair dyed blonde, running through a fake Paris toward a fake Eiffel Tower. The first time I saw it, all I could say was "whoa."
CONSTRUCTION AND TRANSPORT DEPARTMENT OF THE CANTON OF BASEL-STADT | Light Frieze | 2017
A brick wall that glows like it's breathing. This piece brings back the "frieze"—the decorative band that has adorned buildings since ancient Greece—as a 21st-century media facade.
ADDICT AIDE | LIKE MY ADDICTION | 2017
A chic Parisian woman gathered followers in just a few weeks. Travel, parties, boats — nobody noticed, but there was alcohol in every single photo.
ACジャパン（公共広告機構） | IMAGINATION／WHALE（黒い絵） | 2016
Almost the entire film is made up of footage that leaves you feeling uneasy, and then, right at the very end, your whole perspective flips. It feels like watching a team on the verge of a crushing defeat suddenly turn the game around with one stunningly brilliant move. This is a masterpiece that hasn't aged a bit—if anything, it feels like it's only grown heavier with time.
GOOGLE, GE, MINI, NEW YORK TIMES | NYT VR | 2016
A million pieces of cardboard were delivered along with the newspaper. Inside was Google Cardboard. In 2016, the New York Times used it to turn the newspaper business upside down.
BEYONCE | FORMATION | 2016
On 2/6/2016, the night before the Super Bowl, a five-minute video dropped on the world without warning, opening with Beyoncé sitting on top of a New Orleans police car sinking in floodwater. With no corporate brand attached to it at all, this piece became the first-ever Cannes Grand Prix winner in the music category.
NYT VR | THE DISPLACED | 2016
The New York Times tucked one million Google Cardboard viewers into copies of its Sunday paper. Inside was an 11-minute VR documentary called "THE DISPLACED." Readers who opened it up found themselves standing right in the middle of a refugee camp. The following year, it won two Grand Prix at Cannes.
ALPHAGO | AlphaGo | 2016
Seoul, March 2016. The world's strongest Go player, Lee Sedol, faced off against Google's Go-playing AI, AlphaGo, in a five-game match. Go had long been called a game AI could never solve. In just five days, that belief was turned upside down.
PAINT | COLOR FOR THE COLORBLIND | 2016
For the 300 million people worldwide with color blindness, a paint company found a way to "show" them color. Sounds impossible, right?
earth music&ecology | 合唱 | 2015
Aoi Miyazaki singing Miyuki Nakajima's "Nobody Is Right" — that alone could have carried the whole commercial. And yet something about it bothered me.
LEICA | 100 | 2015
100 years ago, Leica took photography "out of the studio." This 2-minute film tells that story through the recreation of 35 iconic photographs. The seamless transitions, the flawless execution, and that provocative narration. The first time I saw it, I forgot to breathe.
ALWAYS | INTIMATE WORDS | 2015
If you don't have the words, you can't describe your symptoms. If you can't describe your symptoms, you can't get diagnosed. The indigenous women of Oaxaca had no words to talk about their own bodies.
CBC | ABLA FAHITA | 2015
A puppet made for an ad got investigated by the state on terrorism charges, and still went on to win the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes. This actually happened in Egypt.
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.
WATER IS LIFE | BUCKET LIST | 2014
When you hear "bucket list," you probably think of things you want to do before you die—a luxury that assumes you'll live a long life. But in sub-Saharan Africa, one in five children doesn't live to see their fifth birthday. There really is a world where a four-year-old needs a bucket list.