Emotion
61 articles
GODADDY | Act Like You Know | 2025
For its Super Bowl comeback after eight years away, GoDaddy didn't go for shock value or crude jokes. Instead, it turned the quiet anxiety of "faking it till you make it" into something genuinely funny.
INDIAN RAILWAYS | Lucky Yatra | 2025
Fare-dodging was costing Indian Railways $800 million a year. Their answer wasn't tougher enforcement. It was turning tickets into lottery tickets.
MCDONALD’S | WINTER TAKES ON COLORS | 2025
A McDonald's restaurant turned into one giant coloring book. What happens when you hand customers the power to add color during Poland's long winter?
Haraku Ramen | One Noodle | 2025
3.5 meters. That's the length of a single noodle. When I heard it described as "a noodle designed so you never have to hit pause," I couldn't help but laugh. This is a genuine love letter to gamers from an Indonesian ramen shop.
カネボウ化粧品 | I HOPE.希望の美容液／I HOPE.希望 | 2025
It's a commercial for a serum, but it barely talks about skin at all. This is the 2025 chapter of the "hope" story that KANEBO has been telling for years.
SPECSAVERS | THE MISHEARD VERSION | 2024
They had Rick Astley re-record "Never Gonna Give You Up" with the lyrics deliberately swapped for commonly misheard versions, then released it with no explanation at all. It got 20 million plays in 8 hours. At Cannes it won six Lions and two Grand Prix. It was the first time a PR agency had won the PR Lions Grand Prix on its own.
高橋酒造 | 生きてくだけで冒険だ。 | 2024
"Just live freely," they say—but nothing is scarier than freedom. A sake maker in Kumamoto addresses this line to young people, and it's an opening that doesn't feel like a typical liquor commercial at all. The idea of comparing life to an RPG never feels cheap—instead, it comes through as hope.
カロリーメイト | 光も影も | 2024
The tenth installment in the series, and the first time an art school exam candidate took the lead role. Boys had taken the lead four years running, from '19 to '22, so longtime fans who'd been thinking "maybe it's a girl's turn soon" couldn't help but grin.
PHILIPS | REFURB (Better Than New) | 2024
Stop selling new products, and sell only repaired ones instead. That's the decision Philips made, and it won a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. This isn't a story about a clever ad idea — it's about changing the way a company actually sells things.
NIKE | Footballverse | 2023
This is the answer NIKE gave to "who is the greatest player of all time." In a secret research lab in Switzerland, Ronaldinho, CR7, and Mbappé clash across time and space over four and a half minutes. The conclusion: "the best is yet to come." Simple, but powerful.
パナソニック | Make New | 2022
When a girl touches a piece of fabric, a cold, lifeless blue world instantly transforms into one overflowing with green. This reversal was actually filmed by flipping the entire set and everyone in it completely upside down.
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).
APPLE | Escape from the Office | 2022
A 9-minute ad. Apple made one in 2022, and it even won the Film Grand Prix at Cannes. It's now in MoMA's permanent collection, too. I watched the whole 9 minutes, start to finish.
FORD | VERY GAY RAPTOR | 2022
It all started with a single line of hate thrown at a YouTube video. Ford didn't demand an apology, and didn't delete it. Instead, they actually built the car.
GIRLS WHO CODE | DOJACODE | 2022
"Doja Cat is one of 999 things girls care about." That one sentence sums up the whole idea. If girls aren't interested in coding, why not use one of those 999 things to pull them in? Doja, in this case.
眞露 | 恋スル！チャミスル シーズン1／恋するチャミスル シーズン2 | 2022
A forbidden romance across class lines, amnesia, a rich young heir, the fiancée of a company president's daughter—this ad packs in every K-drama plot twist you've ever seen, and I couldn't stop watching all six and a half minutes of it.
BMW | NOTHING BUT SHEER JOY | 2022
Chinese Lunar New Year ads have a go-to formula: a long, tearjerking drama about family reunions. In 2022, BMW threw that formula out completely. Ninety seconds, relentlessly upbeat, without a single tear. Choosing not to make people cry actually takes real nerve.
APPLE | The Whole Working-From-Home Thing | 2020
In July 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic, a seven-minute short film arrived from America. It was called "The Whole Working-From-Home Thing." And yes, it was exactly that: kids bursting into meetings, dogs barking, video calls in pajamas, screen-share mistakes, and somehow still making the deadline. The video crossed 10 million views within two days of release. As a sequel to 2019's acclaimed "The Underdogs," it wrapped the chaos that literally everyone was living through in humor.
REDDIT | Superb Owl | 2020
For five seconds, text just appears on screen. You can't read it. But that was the most talked-about ad at the 2021 Super Bowl. Reddit's own line, "Wow, this actually worked," turned out to be exactly right.
TINDER | SWIPE NIGHT | 2020
Three hours left until the end of the world. Open Tinder, and a first-person end-of-days drama begins. You're forced to swipe a choice within seven seconds, and that choice changes not just the story, but who you match with.
DIESEL | ENJOY BEFORE RETURNING | 2020
Buy clothes, wear them, return them, get your money back. This practice, known as "wardrobing," costs the fashion industry an estimated $15 billion a year. DIESEL didn't try to crack down on it. Instead, they openly encouraged it.
CHEETOS | CAN'T TOUCH THIS | 2020
A guy holds up his fingers and says "Can't touch this~" as an excuse, and MC Hammer bursts out from behind him. Wrapped up in a rolled carpet, popping up as a baby's face, climbing out of a picnic basket. It's completely absurd, but that chaos is exactly the strategy behind selling a new product during the Super Bowl.
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.
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.
Microsoft Surface | 夢中って無敵だ | 2017
In spring 2017, a web movie was released for incoming university students. Under the main line "Being Absorbed Is Invincible," it shows students chasing their dreams while working part-time jobs, students drawing on rooftops, and students running around with friends late at night.
GINZA SIX | メインストリート | 2017
The "full happiness mode" that Shiina Ringo sometimes shows is exploding along Ginza's Chuo Dori. A dream duet with Tortoise Matsumoto, an orchestra, dancers, balloons, magic. The 90-second film is so full of joy it feels like a musical movie, and by the end you'll want to walk Ginza's main street yourself.
スタッフサービス | オー人事 秀吉編 | 2017
The whole thing plays out in totally predictable, cliché territory, but there's a split second where you think, "Wait, is it really okay to lump him in with monkeys?" before it settles into a reliable, familiar punchline. This is the period-drama version of the "Oh, Jinji" series that defined an era.
STOCKHOLM PRIDE | LOS SANTOS PRIDE | 2017
They put a pride parade into the world of GTA5 that absolutely cannot be destroyed. In a city where you're allowed to run over pedestrians and shoot criminals, they made the one thing you can't attack—and thinking about what that means gives you chills.
ADIDAS ORIGINALS | ORIGINAL IS NEVER FINISHED | 2017
What does "original" even mean? To answer that question, adidas remixed one of the most overused songs in history, Frank Sinatra's "My Way." The whole idea is ridiculous, and that's exactly why I love it.
Rethink | One Dollar One Show | 2016
Pay just one dollar, and your name gets credited on one of advertising's most prestigious awards. Somehow, this idea actually became a real campaign.
COMMERCIAL RESIDENCE | House of Clicks | 2016
200 million. That's a staggering number. But it wasn't just a number. Etched into all those countless clicks was the shape of the house that two million Swedes dreamed of. They took that data and turned it into bricks and mortar, actually building a real house out of it. It might be the most romantic use of big data you'll ever see.
John Lewis | Buster The Boxer | 2016
John Lewis's annual Christmas ad is a tradition by now. The star of 2016 is a dog named Buster. He wants, more than anything, the trampoline hidden in the garden—but it's actually a present for a little girl named Bridget. Night after night, wild animals sneak out to bounce on it, and Buster just watches. On Christmas morning, it's Buster who bolts outside before the girl even gets there.
高橋酒造 | SHIRO Cheers System | 2015
The cuteness here is just unreal. I love the casting, the choreography, the song, the direction—everything—so much that I've lost count of how many times I've watched it. It might honestly be the video I've watched the most so far this century. Yuichi Kodama really is something else.
LIGA CONTRA EL CANCER | Shadow WiFi | 2015
On a beach in Peru stands a big blue wall. Get close, and your phone picks up WiFi on its own. But the signal only reaches inside the shadow the wall creates.
AMERICAN HONDA MOTOR | PROJECT DRIVE IN | 2014
You need a car to go to a drive-in theater. That point is so obvious nobody ever says it out loud, but Honda took it seriously.
COCA COLA | HAPPY ID | 2014
Turning the photo on your ID card into an ad campaign. And then actually building it into a national system. This campaign, which won the Grand Prix in the Media category at the 2014 Cannes Lions, expanded what we even mean by "media."
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.
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.
LA REDOUTE | THE NAKED MAN | 2012
On January 4, 2012, French fashion retailer La Redoute posted a photo of kids' clothing that happened to have a fully naked man in the background. People instantly branded it an "epic PR fail" and it spread like wildfire. So what did the agency do? Not apologize — they planted more weird photos all over the site and turned it into a game. This completely backwards decision ended up winning a Gold Lion at Cannes.
HYATT HOTELS | THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD | 2012
A movie that criticizes product placement, made possible by product placement. This is that provocative, mischievous humor from Morgan Spurlock, who turns the contradiction itself into the whole point of the project.
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.
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.
TESCO RETAIL | Subway Virtual Store | 2011
If you can't win on number of stores, just stop trying to add more. Instead, turn an entire subway platform into a supermarket. Scan a QR code and your shopping is done—by the time you get home, your groceries are already there. In 2011, this idea out of South Korea got the whole world talking.
YUBARI RESORT | NO MONEY BUT LOVE | 2009
How do you advertise a city that collapsed under 35 billion yen in debt? Normally, you can't. So this city didn't hide the impossible—it just said it out loud. NO MONEY BUT LOVE. No money, but love.
7-ELEVEN | KWIK-E-MART | 2008
A real convenience store disguised as a fake convenience store from a cartoon. And not just one store, but twelve. And done in a single night. The side that had been mocked by The Simpsons as a symbol of unhealthy eating put on that insult like a full costume and wore it proudly.
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.
GUINNESS UDV | noitulovE | 2006
500 million years, rewound in 50 seconds. Three men have their first pint of Guinness in a pub. From there, we trace evolution backward.
BUDLIGHT | REAL MEN OF GENIUS | 2006
"Bud Light presents... Real Men of Genius." A radio ad series that barely mentioned beer at all ended up running for more than 200 episodes over ten years. And Bud Light still sold.