Emotion
85 articles
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?
VIRGINIA GIUFFRE | THE LEGACY OF VIRGINIA GIUFFRE | 2026
An ad that isn't an ad won the biggest prize at the world's largest advertising festival. Zero budget, no film—just articles and interviews. This is the story of one PR person who carried on her late client's fight for a full year.
IDOMED | NIGRUM CORPUS | 2025
"If racism is a disease, the cure is education." To bring that idea to life, a Brazilian medical education institute didn't make a video or a social campaign — they made a book.
L’OREAL | THE FINAL COPY OF ILON SPECHT | 2025
A 17-minute documentary that changes a life. Or, to be precise, it's an experience of watching a life that already *was* changed, forever. In 1971, a 23-year-old copywriter wrote four words that are still used around the world more than 50 years later. A film recording the words she spoke at the very end of her life just won the Grand Prix in the Film category at Cannes Lions 2025. This is a story about advertising. And it isn't. It's a story about a human being.
Centre for Pastoralism | Desi Oon | 2025
An animation where wool itself starts talking—that alone is enough to grab you. This stop-motion film was shot in India over more than a year spent with shepherds, using real Deccani wool. It won a jury award at Annecy 2025, and it's also being talked about in Industry Craft at Cannes 2026.
花王 メリット | 家族と愛とメリット | 2024
The concept and art direction here are just incredible. You can really feel a great team meeting a great client. I ended up buying Merit shampoo, hook, line, and sinker.
ERRATA AT 88 - | Errata at 88 | 2024
In 1962, a legendary concert at Carnegie Hall introduced bossa nova to the world. One of its founders, Alaíde Costa, wasn't on that stage. Now 88 years old, she finally got to stand there.
APPLE | Fuzzy Feelings | 2024
I was on the verge of tears for the whole four minutes. When stop-motion and live action melted together and George Harrison's "Isn't It a Pity" started playing, I was completely gone.
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.
大塚製薬 | 入学から、この世界だった僕たちへ。 | 2023
A track athlete running in a mask, a canoe club member paddling at dusk, a kendo student swinging a sword at home. You can only see half their face, but their eyes alone carry all the intensity.
PGLANG | WE CRY TOGETHER | 2023
A six-minute film that won the Grand Prix in Film Craft at Cannes in 2023. Kendrick Lamar and Taylour Paige play a couple in a brutal argument. It was shot in a single take, with live vocals, in March 2020. The intensity makes you forget to breathe the whole time you're watching. This is less an "ad" than a "work" — but at the same time, it's also the piece that showed the world the overwhelming filmmaking craft of pgLang, the creative company Kendrick and his partner Dave Free launched in 2020.
SOTETSU | A TRAIN OF MEMORIES | 2023
Two minutes, one continuous shot. A story that unfolds entirely inside a train. A father and daughter drift apart and grow close again across 12 years, all while the train car sways around them. That's all it takes to bring you to tears.
大塚製薬 | Midnight Train | 2022
A whole year of a student's life flows past the window of a night train. Carrying both the things they gave their all to and the things left unfinished, the train still keeps running toward morning.
PENGUIN BOOKS | Portuguese (Re)Constitution | 2022
Portugal's first-ever Cannes Lions Grand Prix. And it won out of 1,058 entries. The moment I watched the video, I knew this was a win that had to happen. The sheer intensity of watching a blue pencil cover over the constitution, page by page, is something else.
GUNS DOWN AMERICA | GUN SURVIVOR REVIEWS | 2022
A gun review video on YouTube. Specs, performance, how it feels to handle. It plays out just like any other review. But this reviewer actually survived being shot by that exact gun.
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.
POLYCAM X UNESCO | BACKUP UKRAINE | 2022
In 2022, Russian bombing threatened to wipe out not just lives in Ukraine, but also the sculptures and churches that had watched over its cities for centuries. So creators from the ad industry came up with an idea: turn the smartphone everyone already owns into a tool for protecting cultural treasures.
PENNY | The Wish | 2022
At Christmas 2021, German supermarket PENNY made a three-minute film. A son asks his mother an offhand question, and she answers: she wishes he could get his youth back. All of it—the late nights, the heartbreak, the adventures sneaking out—everything the pandemic took away.
大塚製薬 | カロリーメイト 見えないもの篇 | 2021
2020 was a year when everyone fought an invisible virus. And CALORIEMATE still delivered its usual commercial to that year's students taking entrance exams. But things didn't go as usual. Remote classes, disinfectant, acrylic partitions, cancelled competitions. The moment Naotaro Moriyama's "Sakura" started playing, the tears wouldn't stop.
大日本除虫菊 | ゴキブリと少年 その1／その2／その3 | 2021
The son believes the cockroach he's named Charlie is his friend. One day, his father asks him a question amid a swarm of cockroaches: "Can you tell which one is Charlie?" The answer is no, he can't.
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.
東京ガス | 家族の絆 おばあちゃんの料理 | 2020
Everyone has some small regret. A word you blurted out back then. A line you can never take back. Sometimes that kind of thorn stays stuck in your heart for years without you ever pulling it out. This commercial carefully draws out that exact kind of pain over 90 seconds. By the end, you'll want to cry, and you'll want to go see someone.
SANDY HOOK PROMISE | Back to School Essentials | 2020
A cheerful back-to-school shopping scene slowly turns into a nightmare over 66 seconds. Binders and shoes are, for American kids, just tools to survive school — and this ad hits you with that reality when you least expect it.
BEATS BY DRE | You Love Me | 2020
"You love Black culture. But do you love us?" In November 2020, Beats asked that question in a two-minute film.
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.
CHARITÉ BERLIN UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL | Printed by Parkinson's | 2020
A 3D printer is shaking. It's been injected with data from a patient's tremors.
BURGER KING | CONFUSING TIMES | 2020
2020 was a year when everyone felt confused. Burger King made a radio ad that put that exact feeling of confusion into words—things like catching a sneeze with your elbow, then high-fiving with that same elbow. And the twist is, it was actually an ad for the Impossible Whopper, which tastes like meat but isn't meat. Presenting confusion as confusion, honestly, turned out to be the most honest approach of all.
Nike | 動かしつづける。自分を。未来を。 / The Future Isn't Waiting. | 2020
In November (11) 2020, all of Japan held its breath for two minutes. The film believed that the urge to play sports could lightly blow away garbage like discrimination. I've watched it ten times. "A standard masterpiece" feels like the right phrase for it, but that makes me wonder: what's the difference between a standard masterpiece and one that isn't standard at all?
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.
KLOOP | KOSHOGO | 2019
A white cloth appeared in the city. It was supposed to be a symbol of marriage—but it had become a record of violence.
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.
BRBR | HEROES OF TODAY | 2019
The screen is black and white: Berlin, 1936. A Black athlete walks down a street hung with swastikas. People passing by turn to stare and whisper, and even a child hurls a slur at him. Then, just as he steps into the stadium, it hits you — wait, this is a tweet from today.
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.
P&G | THE TALK | 2018
What comes to mind when you hear "the talk"? Most people think of the conversation about sex. But for Black parents in America, it meant something else entirely: the conversation where you teach your child the reality of racism. From that one gap in meaning came a film that won the Grand Prix at Cannes.
MONTEFIORE | CORAZON - GIVE YOUR HEART | 2018
Shoot a 48-minute film, then wrap up donor registration in just 15 seconds. That's what Montefiore Medical Center pulled off. Audiences leaving the theater held their phone to their chest, the poster woke up, and registration was done. It won the Grand Prix in the Health & Wellness category at Cannes in 2018.
MARCH FOR OUR LIVES PARKLAND STUDENTS | Price on Our Lives | 2018
$1.05. That's the total amount Senator Marco Rubio received from the NRA, divided by the total number of students in Florida. It's the orange price tag that survivors of the Parkland high school shooting wore as the "price" of their own lives. The campaign generated 826 media placements and 2.2 billion media impressions, and through the power of math, anger, and design, it irreversibly changed the gun control debate in America.
キリン 午後の紅茶 | あいたいって、あたためたいだ。18冬 | 2018
This series began in winter 2016, and apparently this is its conclusion. It's the kind of project where the casting alone practically guarantees success, but using the same actors across multiple years takes it even further. You can clearly see, right there on screen, what's been lost and what's been gained, and in that sense a different kind of charm emerges.
Erste Group | #believeinyourself | 2018
A minute-and-a-half video you'll want to watch alone on a cold night. Henry the hedgehog quietly gets to you.
CHILD FOCUS | Coins of Hope | 2017
The king's face stamped on a coin was replaced with the face of a missing child, and the coin was put into real circulation. Nobody noticed as they spent it—until that one coin waited for the moment someone's eyes would finally land on it.
THE BLAZE | TERRITORY | 2017
In the first 30 seconds, a man just keeps crying. He tries to hold back the tears, but they spill over, his family wraps him in a hug, and he can't stop anymore. This five-minute music video, built from just 22 shots, won the Grand Prix in the Film Craft category at Cannes Lions 2017.
THE AMMADA TRUST | #GIVEHER5 | 2017
One by one, girls vanish from the classroom. This is the story of girls in India who miss school every time they get their period. One in five of them ends up dropping out of school for good.
サントリーBOSS | 働くって、いいもんだ。THE LAST TRAIN | 2017
This is the story of a surprise staged for a station manager's retirement, at Akihabara Station after the last train had gone. On a platform where no one should have been at that hour, his coworkers were waiting for him. Just imagining someone close to you reaching their "last shift" is enough to bring tears to your eyes.
HEINEKEN | Gender Violence | 2017
A beer commercial lines up all the classic symbols of "manliness" — muscles, boxing, welding — then suddenly declares that how a man treats women is what truly defines him. And it's coming from a brand that's called itself "the beer for men" since 1944.
OLD SPICE | SMELLCOME TO MANHOOD (MOM'S SONG) | 2016
A mother hiding outside her son's bedroom door, secretly singing to herself — that image alone is unsettling. Once their sons start using Old Spice, they suddenly become magnets for girls, and the mothers sing about it together, looking almost heartbroken.
リクルート | 卒おめ | 2016
This is one of those classic ads I find myself watching again every year around this time. It captures that particular spring when high school seniors are finishing up, set to a wonderful Chatmonchy song, and every time I watch it, something about it hits me right in the chest.
トヨタ | Loving Eyes | 2016
A story about a father and daughter, released for Father's Day. Ads about fathers and daughters aren't exactly rare, but the turn it takes in the second half will definitely make you cry. The first half alone is pretty intense, but once the song starts playing in the girl's voice partway through, it's completely over for you.
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.
BAOBEIHUIJIA | Search for Free WiFi, Search for Missing Children | 2015
What if the WiFi network you were about to connect to was named "Help, Find Me"? In China, more than 200,000 children go missing every year, and this was the answer TBWA/Shanghai came up with.