Emotion
283 articles
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).
WOMEN IN GAMES | GENDER SWAP | 2022
Male heroes swinging their hips, dancing seductively, striking provocative poses. Taking the movements that have long been treated as "normal" for female characters in games and transplanting them directly onto male characters suddenly makes them feel deeply strange.
HARIBO | キッズボイス 相撲 | 2021
A hulking sumo wrestler in a yukata says things like "Squishy-squishy~" and "It's so juicy." But the voice is a child's. For three seconds you're confused, and the next second you're already grinning.
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.
XBOX | THE BIRTH OF GAMING TOURISM | 2020
Game ads are usually about weapons and heroes. Xbox decided to sell its games as a "tourist destination" instead. You've got to applaud the sheer craziness of that.
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.
Aviation Gin | Arlene's Big Leap | 2020
Arlene was born on 2/29/1936, making her 84 this year. But since her birthday only comes once every four years, 2/29/2020 was finally her "21st" birthday. Technically speaking, that makes this the first legal drink of her life.
日清食品 | 匂わせたい | 2020
A man's shoulder caught in the edge of a glass. Matching shoes. A poem you read vertically that spells out "I'm with the winning team." Ugh, another hint-dropping girl on social media, you think, getting a little annoyed. But that annoyance turns into pure delight by the end.
BURGER KING | STEVENAGE CHALLENGE | 2020
An English fourth-tier club averaging 3,000 fans a game, rated one star in FIFA 20. The moment Burger King became their sponsor, gamers around the world started transferring Messi and Ronaldo onto this team.
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.
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.
OLD TOWN ROAD FT. BILLY RAY CYRUS | Old Town Road (Official Movie) | 2020
A 20-year-old college dropout bought a beat for 30 dollars and wrote a song over it in a single day. That song was "Old Town Road." The official music video went on to win the Grand Prix in Entertainment Lions for Music at Cannes in 2021.
BURGER KING | THE MOLDY WHOPPER | 2020
A burger covered in mold became one of the most beautiful ads in the world. In 2020, Burger King released footage of a Whopper rotting over 35 days, with the tagline "The Beauty of No Artificial Preservatives." It broke a food-advertising taboo head-on.
COPI | ADDRESSPOLLUTION.ORG | 2020
When you buy a house, someone tells you if there's asbestos. But nobody tells you how dirty the air is. The moment I noticed that imbalance, I couldn't help but growl.
DIESEL | FRANCESCA | 2020
This film, released for Pride Month 2020, has you watching what looks like a transgender story—until the very end, when it pulls the rug out from under you. She takes off her DIESEL denim and puts on a nun's habit.
POPEYES | THAT LOOK FROM POPEYES | 2020
A few days after Beyoncé's new apparel line sold out instantly, fans online were buzzing about one thing: "wait, this looks just like Popeyes' uniform." Popeyes took that and sold the real thing, exactly as it was, on their own online store.
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.
MUMBAI POLICE | THE PUNISHING SIGNAL | 2020
The more you honk, the longer the light stays red. Mumbai, one of the noisiest cities in the world, built a traffic signal that punishes honking itself.
POPEYES LOUISIANA KITCHEN | CHICKEN WARS | 2020
In August 2019, a tweet of just 15 characters shook up the restaurant industry. The story goes that a chicken sandwich — ten weeks' worth of stock — sold out in just eight days.
日経電子版 | 見えてきた？ | 2019
Nikkei Digital Edition's "Did You See It?" series started in 2019, and it became a talking point for actor Sho Kiyohara's mysterious, repeated line "Ah, I see." This flea market app installment is a 15-second spot where a guy glances over at his girlfriend using a flea market app and, somehow, only he ends up nodding and saying "Ah, I see." Some have praised it for capturing something very relatable about young women today, but honestly, it wasn't easy to tell exactly what he was supposed to be "getting."
CARLINGS | ADDRESS THE FUTURE | 2019
You buy clothes, wear them, take a photo, post it online. But what if those clothes never actually existed? In 2019, Norway's CARLINGS released the world's first fully digital clothing collection, and honestly, my first reaction was "wait, what?" But this campaign went on to win the first-ever Grand Prix in the Digital Craft category.
WENDY’S | Keeping Fortnite Fresh | 2019
A fast food chain spent nine hours destroying freezers inside Fortnite, and the game's developer ended up removing freezers from the game entirely. This stunt beat Nike's "Dream Crazy" to win the very first Grand Prix in the Social & Influencer category at Cannes Lions.
PURINA | STREET-VET | 2019
Make a sign that dogs can't resist peeing on, then use that pee to check their health. Sounds absurd written out, but it actually makes perfect sense.
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.
AB INBEV | TagWords | 2018
What's printed on the billboard isn't a photo—it's a "search term." This one's pure genius.
JORDAN BRAND | A/R JORDAN | 2018
That dunk Jordan made in 1988 — you could summon it through your phone's camera on Snapchat. And you could buy the shoes right there on the spot, with delivery the same day. In 2018, one brand built that kind of experience.
GOOGLE | Know What Your Data Knows | 2018
In 2018, during a live NCAA basketball broadcast watched by 43 million people across the US, Google Cloud built and aired a commercial on the spot, shaped by how the game was actually unfolding. A commercial coming together in real time, right alongside the commentary—just hearing about it is stressful enough.
ALDI | Fresh Prints | 2018
I always thought "real-time" was a digital-only thing. But at 7am, vegetables wrapped in newspaper were delivered to homes across Spain, wrapped together with that very day's latest news. A comeback move where print media proved it could capture "freshness in this exact moment."
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.
LOUVRE ABU DHABI | Highway Gallery | 2018
You're driving down a desert highway when the radio suddenly starts explaining Van Gogh. Outside your window: a giant "self-portrait." What Louvre Abu Dhabi pulled off was basically a free sample of an entire museum.
Harvey Nichols | Shoplifters | 2017
Security camera footage became the ad itself, and it won the Grand Prix at Cannes. And the ones doing the filming? Actual shoplifters.
JAXA | KIBO SCIENCE 360 - A Space Experiment with Google | 2017
Just assemble a single piece of cardboard, and you can become an astronaut. "KIBO SCIENCE 360," created by JAXA, Google, and Dentsu, is a project that recreates the Kibo experiment module on the ISS in VR.
GEICO | Crushed | 2017
In the frozen food aisle, the walls slowly close in, squashing both the people and the products. The idea here is to physically "shrink" a pre-roll ad.
Donate Life America | The World's Biggest Asshole | 2017
Coleman F. Sweeney is the biggest jerk in town. He pees while driving and tosses it out the window, shoots the neighbor's dog with a paintball gun, steals candy from kids on Halloween. But he was an organ donor.
湖池屋 | スゴーンなダンス | 2017
Do you remember that ballroom dance commercial Masahiko Sato made back in 1988? With its catchy jingle, it was a legendary ad that swept through the era on rhythm and nonsense. Now, 29 years later in 2017, Koikeya launched an upgraded snack called "Sugo-n," and that very commercial came back to life in the 21st century, done up with EDM music and lightning-fast footwork dancing.
Skittles | Romance | 2017
This is the 2017 version of Skittles' 30-second Super Bowl spot, from the brand known for "the finger thing." A boy keeps throwing candy at a window—looks like it's shaping up to be a romantic scene, but it's not just his girlfriend who ends up catching them. That reliable punchline strikes again.
UQ mobile | 紀香の誕生日 | 2017
The moment Norika showed up on screen, I went "huh?"—and then about two seconds later it hit me with a full "whoa!" I'd been watching the UQ Three Sisters series because I love Mikako Tabe, so having Fujiwara Norika suddenly turn up was a real shock. This feels like one of those ideas that must have felt amazing the second someone thought of it.
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.
AIG Japan | #TackleTheRisk | 2017
At Shibuya's scramble crossing, All Blacks players suddenly appear and start tackling passersby left and right. At first you think "what is this violence," but once the reveal comes, it all clicks into place.
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."
SONY | GRAVITY CAT | 2017
A cat walks on walls, runs across the ceiling, and two sisters fall into the sky along with their entire apartment. For four straight minutes, I just kept asking myself, "Is this really not CGI?"
ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO | Van Gogh's Bedrooms | 2017
You could actually spend the night in Van Gogh's Bedroom. Turning a museum exhibit into a $10-a-night Airbnb stay is a wild idea.
CHEETOS | CHEETOS MUSEUM | 2017
Finding oddly-shaped Cheetos inside the bag, then putting them on display in a museum. This ridiculous idea led to the best sales week in the brand's history.
BMW RUSSIA | ULTIMATE GIVING PLEASURE | 2017
For BMW's 100th anniversary, they built a dedicated free gate. And it wasn't only BMW owners who could pass through it.
EXPEDIA | Visit Britain | 2017
Tilt your phone north and you're in Scotland. Tilt it west and you're in Wales. A video experience where the direction you tilt decides your destination.