Emotion
285 articles
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.
REEBOK | Escape The Sofa | 2002
A man stands up to go exercise, and his sofa attacks him. That's the whole story — and it won gold at Cannes.
FOX INTERNATIONAL | Regional Sports Campaign | 2001
A diver leaps off a cliff, but there's no water where the surface should be, and he slams into the ground. An athlete tries to catch a huge falling tree with his bare hands and gets crushed by it. Two drunk guys trading real punches. Blindfolded men fighting with clubs. Four completely insane ads, made to look exactly like real sports broadcasts, won the Grand Prix at Cannes.
プロバイダーZERO | Don't Spend Money!! | 2000
It's Steve Buscemi. That alone tells you they were swinging for the fences.
NIKE | DRIVING RANGE | 2000
Tiger Woods just walks through a driving range, and one by one, the amateurs around him start hitting perfect swings. But the moment he leaves, everyone suddenly slices their shot. The gap alone is funny.
サントリー | BOSS セブン 世界を敵に篇 | 1999
This ad is from 1999. Watching it again, you can't help wondering what Uno Kanda is up to these days — but more than that, this commercial takes nitpicking to an almost legendary scale and turns it into pure entertainment.
コンタクトのアイシティ | 透明人間 | 1999
In 1999, an ad with absolutely wild energy hit Japanese TV. It's 60 seconds of glasses-wearing guys who get their hands on an invisibility drug and go streaking through the city, completely naked. There's a suppository, floating glasses, and more ridiculous details than you can count — yet somehow it's hilarious, and somehow it makes perfect sense. A true classic.
TOYOTA | BUGGER | 1999
Small accidents keep happening out on the farm, one after another, and each time someone - or even a dog - just mutters the word "bugger." That's the entire commercial. And yet, before it even aired, it had the client genuinely terrified.
LEVI STRAUSS & CO. | ID | 1999
In 1999, a yellow puppet took over the world. Riding in a beat-up blue car, bobbing its head to a techno beat. When the police pull them over, it shows its ID, just like that. Human or puppet, both totally normal. Nobody ever bothered explaining the absurdity of it all.
HOLLYWOOD VIDEO | DON | 1999
That movie-trailer voice crawls out from under the counter at a video rental store. One ad from Hollywood Video, 1999.
MILLER BREWING CO. | Fly | 1998
This is one entry from the "Dick" series that the legendary Minneapolis agency Fallon McElligott made for Miller Lite in 1998. It's framed as the work of a fictional creative director named "Dick," turning the ad itself into the joke. For its time, this must have been a pretty bold move.
FOX NETWORK | BILLIARDS | 1998
Back in 1998, this 30-second spot ran with a simple premise: what if billiards were as physical as hockey?
IMPULSE | ART SCHOOL | 1998
A nude model at an art school "reacts" when a woman arrives late to class. The awkwardness of the moment gets expressed through the objects around them, used as metaphors. This was a body spray commercial that aired on British television in 1998.
DIESEL | 5 AM MONO VILLAGE | 1997
In 1997, DIESEL actually won the Grand Prix at Cannes with two separate ads — one was "Little Rock," and the other was this one. Both were made by the Swedish agency Paradiset DDB, and the same brand winning two Grand Prix in the same year is almost unheard of.
DIESEL | LITTLE ROCK | 1997
A western hero gets shot dead by the villain. And the ad uses that to talk about "success." This is the piece that won DIESEL and PARADISET DDB the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1997.
TELENORDIA | INTERNET | 1997
It was 1997, the early dawn of the internet, back when images loaded "from the top down," line by line.
VOLKSWAGEN | Surprisingly Ordinary Prices - Dentist | 1997
A dentist, hand still inside a patient's mouth, freezes with wide eyes. That single shot became part of British advertising history in the 90s.
GUINNESS | Not everything in black and white makes sense (Bicycle) | 1997
A fish hops on a bicycle and pedals smoothly off the edge of the screen. In that one moment, every bit of logic built up before it gets turned upside down.
MERCEDES E-CLASS | RHINOS | 1996
1996. The year the Mercedes E-Class debuted with a new face, there was an ad featuring a rhino. The title was "RHINOS." Pretty much says it all.
日清食品 | カップヌードル麻婆・五目 | 1995
The second you hear "asabaa," your brain just goes "huh?" A female employee misreads "mapo" as "asabaa," confidently adds that it comes with a refined grandma, her boss explodes in anger, and reality snaps back. All packed into just 15 seconds.
PEPSI-COLA | INNER-TUBE | 1995
A boy wearing an inner tube at the beach is drinking a Pepsi through a straw. He sucks and sucks, trying to get every last drop — and ends up getting pulled into the bottle himself, tube and all. His little sister turns and says, "Mom, he did it again." This 60-second spot aired during the Super Bowl in 1995, and it hits you with a "wait, what?" before you're already laughing.
JEEP | Snow Covered | 1994
It's 1994, and for 30 seconds something moves through a landscape buried in snow. The vehicle itself never once appears on screen. And yet everyone watching thought, "Ah, that's a Jeep." This is the ad that became the first car commercial ever to win the Grand Prix at Cannes, and even 30 years later, it hasn't lost an ounce of its power.
LEVI | Creek | 1994
In a black-and-white scene by a river, two girls catch a glimpse of a naked man. What had been left behind wasn't just clothes — it was a pair of 501s. It looks like a modest little ad, but this is the one BBH's own founder has called his personal favorite.
SMIRNOFF | MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE | 1993
In 1993, a Smirnoff bottle bent the world out of shape. Look through it, and piano keys turn into penguins, an old man turns into a walrus, a brooch turns into something else entirely. Surreal, witty, and a little unsettling all at once. This "through the bottle" idea became one of the defining images of Smirnoff in the 90s.
BRITISH AIRWAYS | Surprise Surprise | 1993
Something happened in a movie theater in 1993. The title "Surprise Surprise" seems to say it all, but the details remain a mystery.
CENTRAAL BEHEER | BOX | 1993
A group of men risk their lives carrying a heavy wooden crate marked "fragile" toward a ship. They nearly drop it again and again, narrowly saving it each time—and then, right at the end, the camera slowly zooms in on the ship's name. That's where fate takes its turn.
TALENS RUBBER CEMENT | Nuns | 1992
Have you seen this Spanish ad that won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1992? It's the one where a statue of the baby Jesus in a convent garden is missing a very particular part, and the young nuns, blushing furiously, rush off to tell the mother superior. More than 30 years later, people are still talking about this masterpiece that used humor to break through a taboo.
エーザイ | チョコラBB | 1991
"Doesn't it wear you out, how many idiots there are in the world?" The moment Kaori Momoi said that straight into the camera, all of Japan erupted. In 1991, complaints poured in right after the Chocola BB commercial aired, and within a few days it was swapped for a different version. But that may have been the plan all along. This is the story of an almost too-perfect "hit, then hit back" moment that's gone down in advertising history.
キューサイ | まずい！もう一杯！ | 1990
In 1990, the villain actor Nobuo Yana held up a glass and scrunched up his face. "It's awful!" he said. Then: "One more glass!" I was floored that a health food commercial would go there.
BATCHELORS | ODE TO A PEA | 1990
A white plate. One single pea. A violin swells as a poetic voice intones, "Oh pea, perfect sphere of jade, why do you torment me with your beauty?" Britain, 1990.
EMPRESA FOLHA DA MANHA | Points of View (HITLER) | 1989
At first, all you see on screen is a scatter of dots. But as the camera pulls back, those dots come together into the face of Hitler. A newspaper built this trick to make one point: if you only look up close, you'll get the whole picture wrong.
PENN ATHLETIC PRODUCTS | BOUNCE TEST | 1989
In 1989, Minneapolis agency Fallon McElligott unleashed a 30-second spot on the world. To prove the "consistency of bounce" of a racquetball, it wasn't just balls getting dropped from a building.
NYNEX | Human Cartoons | 1988
In 1988, how do you make a "boring free product" like the phone book interesting? TBWA CHIAT/DAY's answer was a visual riddle.
NYNEX | If it's out there, it's in here / DUMBWAITERS | 1988
A phone book ad that actually gets a laugh — that's a big deal. NYNEX's Yellow Pages ads were a memorable presence in the northeastern US in the late '80s.
AUDI | PROCON 10 | 1987
It was 1987, a time when airbags were still expensive and no one could be totally sure they'd actually work when it mattered. Audi chose a different way to protect lives—not with electronics, but with plain physics.
AGNESI | SILENCE（Silenzio, parla Agnesi） | 1986
An ad that showed nothing but silence, all for the sake of one final line, won Gold at Cannes. A commercial that made saying nothing say everything.
LEGO | KIPPER | 1981
LEGO, 1981. A mouse turns into a dog, a cat turns into a dragon, a submarine turns into an elephant. For 45 seconds, every time the bricks get rearranged, something new appears.
DARTY | JOURNEE BIEN REMPLIE | 1977
In 1977, French electronics retailer DARTY won GOLD — that's the only record that quietly remains today. Almost no explanation of what the ad actually contained can be found.
FRATELLI BRANCA DISTILLERIE | BR… BRANCAMENTA | 1975
"Brrr." Just four letters, and somehow they carry the brand name, how to drink it, and the sensation all at once. This campaign, which began in 1971, is said to have become the most famous piece of onomatopoeia in the history of Italian advertising.
VOLKSWAGEN | KAFERKILLER | 1970
This is VW's piece that won the Grand Prix at Cannes Lions in 1970. The title is "KAFERKILLER." Käfer is German for beetle, meaning the Beetle. Killer means, well, killer. I've always been curious what an ad looked like where VW declared it was "killing" its own icon.
RONSON | COMET | 1967
In 1967, a quiet revolution was happening in the world of lighters.
ROHM UND HAAS CHEMISCHE FABRIK | King Acrylius (253,000 Hours) | 1965
1965. A transparent sheet of acrylic became an animated king and took home the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival — a first for Germany. The idea of handing a material's own qualities — transparency, durability, workability — to a character and building the whole ad around it still feels completely alive with 60s energy, practically spilling off the screen.
GENERAL MOTORS | MAGIC RIDE | 1961
1961. An ad where you can't actually see the car — and it won a Clio.
MAGGI | OPÉRA BŒUF | 1957
1957. This is a MAGGI pot-au-feu ad where cattle sing and dance in the style of an opéra bouffe (comic opera). The moment I saw the title, I tilted my head and thought, "Beef opera?"—but once I watched the video, it all made sense. For an ad of its time, this is wildly bold.
CHLORODONT TOOTHPASTE | IL CIRCO | 1954
In 1954, at the first advertising film festival held in Venice, this piece rose to the top of 187 entries. At this festival, which would later become Cannes Lions, "Il Circo" won the very first Grand Prix.