Emotion
285 articles
ユニクロ | UNIQLO LUCKY SWITCH | 2009
In 2009, the method UNIQLO chose to promote its year-end sale was a bold piece of advertising that took over other people's blogs and turned them into a lottery venue without asking.
NHK | COTO-TAMA | 2009
Just the title, COTO-TAMA, already hints at some kind of wordplay. This is a 2009 piece for NHK made by Hakuhodo. It's about little clusters of words rolling across a computer desktop, eventually making their way onto the wall of a building at a live event.
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.
BMW | THE KINETIC SCULPTURE FOR THE BMW MUSEUM | 2009
At the entrance of the BMW Museum, 714 metal spheres hang in mid-air. At first it looks like nothing at all. But wait seven minutes, and the shape of a car appears.
Skittles | Touch the Rainbow | 2009
In 2009, Skittles had viewers press their finger right onto their computer screen. That finger then became part of the video itself — turning into a tightrope, or a boxer's opponent.
PlayStation | Play Face | 2009
Emotion shows on your face. That's basically what the word "expression" means, so it's obvious - but this campaign captured that obvious truth head-on. The faces of people playing a game. That's it. But that's everything.
MARS | STRAUCHANIE SPONSORSHIP | 2009
In 2009, MARS launched a sponsorship deal in Australia with a player who didn't actually exist.
NYC & CO. AND WARNER BROTHERS | Oasis Dig Out Your Soul In The Streets | 2009
In September 2008 (month 9), on the New York subway, a street musician was playing a brand-new Oasis song that hadn't even been released yet.
SONY | PLAY-DOH | 2008
Rabbits filling up an entire city. And here's the thing: this isn't CGI. It's all stop-motion. It's completely insane.
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.
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.
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.
CADBURY | GORILLA | 2008
A gorilla plays the drums. That's it. For 90 seconds, no product, no dialogue. Just drumming along to a Phil Collins song. And somehow, that was enough to make the whole world smile.
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.
江崎グリコ | OTONA GLICO 〜25年後の磯野家〜 | 2008
In 2008, Sazae-san got a live-action adaptation nobody saw coming. And the premise was wild: it was set 25 years in the future. Tadanobu Asano as Katsuo, Rie Miyazawa as Wakame, Eita as Tara-chan, Shun Oguri as Ikura-chan. The casting alone was enough to make people go "wait, you can actually do that?"—a real testament to the strength of the idea.
VOLKSWAGEN | FOUR HOURS | 2007
The title is simply "FOUR HOURS." Just that one phrase, a length of time sitting there on its own, with no hint of what those four hours were actually for. I honestly can't picture it. But that very bluntness is what makes it stick in my mind.
ASB | MONEY GOES DIGITAL | 2007
In 2007, ASB, a bank in New Zealand, ran an ad in a place no one had ever seen one before: on banknotes themselves. The idea of sticking stickers onto real, circulating currency won the Grand Prix in the Media category at Cannes Lions.
BURGER KING | XBOX KING GAMES | 2007
Burger King's agency made three Xbox games. They sold them for $3.99 as an add-on to value meals. They sold 3.2 million copies. The company's quarterly profit went up 40%. This is the story of an ad agency that made a product instead of an ad, and made the company money.
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.
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.
SMIRNOFF | TEA PARTAY | 2007
For a new product launch with no budget and no TV airtime, BBH chose a parody rap video instead. Within days of going live, it reached a million people.
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.
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.
STELLA ARTOIS | Ice Skating Priests | 2006
Monks skating on a frozen pond. A young one falls through the ice, and his fellow monks rush over—not to him, but to the beer. Just when you think they've pulled it to safety, they push it back under the ice again. Two minutes, black and white. By the end, all you can say is "oh, I got had."
BURGER KING | WHOPPERETTES | 2006
At the 2006 Super Bowl, BURGER KING had dancers dressed as lettuce, tomato, pickle, patty, and flame perform a Broadway-style musical number. Set to the "Have It Your Way" jingle, it's a spot where the burger's ingredients sing and dance for real.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sprite | Pragnienie nie ma szans (Strip Poker) | 2005
Losing your clothes in a bottle cap contest? What's that all about?
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.
APPEALNOW.COM | KICKING | 2005
Released in the UK in 2005, this shocking video shows a parking warden suddenly tackling a passerby, pinning him to the ground, and finally kicking him. It became a talked-about viral ad that was both darkly funny and full of anger at unfair parking tickets.
HENKEL | REALITY ADVERTISING | 2005
A monitor, stuck to a wall. That's all this footage showed—and it ran nonstop for 24 hours straight. Brazil, 2005.
OLYMPUS | RED-EYED BABY | 2005
A husband terrified by a photo of a baby with red-eye. This ad, which pitched a digital camera's red-eye correction feature with the tone of a horror movie, won Gold at Cannes in 2005.
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.
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.
富士ゼロックス | HUMAN BEATBOX | 2004
In 2004, a man appeared on TV making the sounds of drums, bass, and scratching, all with just his mouth. The word "human beatbox" wasn't something anyone knew back then. That feeling of "what is this?" flowed straight into living rooms across the country.
CIVIC | Everyday | 2004
In 2003, Honda poured about 600 million yen into a single campaign, running three commercials at once. "Everyday" was the youngest of those three siblings.
NIKE | STICKMAN | 2003
In 2003, a black stick figure stepped onto the pitch alongside Ronaldinho and started kicking a ball around. But it didn't stop there. It swallowed the ball whole, ripped off its own leg, and used it to take a shot. One wildly illegal-feeling move.
REEBOK | Terry Tate, Office Linebacker | 2003
The moment it aired during the 2003 Super Bowl, all of America burst out laughing. A football linebacker patrols the office — the premise is completely insane, but the ad plays it dead straight, shot like a real documentary. It's one of those perfect pieces of work. The Reebok logo barely shows up. Not one pair of sneakers appears on screen. And yet it became one of the most memorable Super Bowl commercials of all time.
TANGO | SEAL | 2003
Orcas toy with a baby seal like a ball, then toss it onto the beach. For the first 40 seconds, it keeps up the pretense of being a nature documentary.
NZ FIRE SERVICE | SPEED OF FIRE | 2003
As a timer ticks steadily forward, a living room fills with smoke. From New Zealand in 2002 comes an ad that shows the speed of fire exactly as it happens.
IKEA | Lamp (Unböring campaign) | 2003
In 2002, a lamp got thrown out onto the street. Sitting there in the rain, staring through a window at the shiny new lamp that replaced it, the whole scene was so pitiful, so painfully human, that it tugged at anyone watching. Then a man with a Swedish accent stepped into frame and said one line that would end up carved into advertising history.
TANGO | BARREL | 2003
In 2003, the British fizzy drink brand TANGO came back with that legendary slogan. "You Know When You've Been Tango'd" — the catchphrase that stirred controversy in the '90s but made its mark on advertising history was revived with a new agency.
NIKE | ANGRY CHICKEN | 2003
A young man, chased by an angry chicken, jumps, climbs, and scrambles his way across an entire city. The whole thing is shot like a nature documentary, narrated entirely in French. The setup is completely absurd, but every single move is real.
ホットペッパー | アフレコCMシリーズ | 2002
There's a world here that I, not being from Kansai, could never have come up with on my own, and I deeply relate to that. But at the same time, I don't think this is something only a Kansai person could make—I think it's something only one genius, Takaaki Yamazaki, could have made.
BURNING HEART RECORDS | MILLENCOLIN BATTLE | 2002
In 2002, putting a CD into your computer launched a game. Looking closer, I was stunned. This was basically Guitar Hero, three years before Guitar Hero existed.