Emotion
329 articles
HYUNDAI | COQUÍ ALARMED | 2026
Puerto Rico's car theft alarm sound turned out to be the call of the island's beloved frog. Once people realized it had been quietly borrowed, they were not happy about it.
Cathay Pacific | Back to Kai Tak | 2026
Kai Tak Airport closed in 1998. It was known as the world's toughest landing, with planes banking 47 degrees between high-rise buildings before touching down. Twenty-seven years later, Cathay Pacific flew that sky once more. This time, though, it wasn't a landing — it was a flypast.
TRA Mongkut Fertilizer | Soil Stay | 2026
A sample of soil, handed over as payment for a place to stay. That's the idea behind this farmstay program for farmers, created by Thai fertilizer brand TRA Mongkut and VML, which won the Grand Prix at Spikes Asia 2026.
Snack Jack Ring | Mother Strike | 2026
A mother steps straight into her son's video game. Just that premise alone makes you want to watch. This film from Thailand pulls it off well, layering the story of a family finding its way back into the same circle over the round shape of the snack itself.
Vi (Vodafone Idea) | Guardian Beads | 2026
Maha Kumbh Mela draws 500 million pilgrims, and every day 5,000 people go missing. When they bathe, phone numbers written on their palms simply wash away. Vi came up with a way to turn family phone numbers into something people wear instead — a string of prayer beads.
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.
CLUB DEPORTIVO MUNICIPAL | THE THOUSAND SPONSORS OF MUNI | 2026
Put 1,000 companies' logos on a jersey. It sounds like a joke, but it actually saved a club.
WISŁA KRAKÓW FOOTBALL CLUB | LUCKY FAN INDEX | 2026
The idea that fans bring their team luck is just superstition. But a Polish football club decided to take that superstition seriously and actually turn it into a number.
COINBASE | Your Way Out | 2026
During the live broadcast of the Academy Awards, the screen was interrupted by a blocky, low-poly town. As NPCs wander back and forth, one man struggles to break free from the system and runs toward reality. This has zero CGI. It's all live action.
TOO GOOD | PAID SICK LEAVE FOR COWS | 2026
Sick leave for cows. I laughed when I first heard it. But by the time I stopped laughing, I realized this is a seriously important idea.
APPLE TV | APPLE TV REBRAND | 2026
In an era when anything can be made easily with CGI, they went out of their way to shoot it with glass, light, and lenses. Apple TV's new logo film is, in fact, entirely captured through real optical photography.
SUNCORP INSURANCE | HAVEN | 2026
What would you do if your own house turned to you and said, "Actually, I'm not great with floods"? An insurance company came up with the idea of having the house itself speak.
HEINEKEN | THE PUB THAT REFUSED TO DIE | 2026
In a small village in Ireland, the only pub in town was about to close. Instead of shooting a commercial about it, Heineken went and actually saved the place.
ADIDAS | SUPERNOVA ADAPTIVE | 2026
It's an ad, but what it's really about is just a shoe. And that shoe got people running who couldn't run before.
RAINBOW LOBSTER MEXICO | 600K Network | 2026
600,000 people scanned a QR code with their phones and exposed fraud in a presidential election. This wasn't really an ad—it was a tool for revolution.
AUTISM SOCIETY | Language of Bedwetting | 2026
There was no word to explain bedwetting in any AAC app in the world. Noticing this gap, this campaign went ahead and built an entirely new "language" out of more than 100 symbols.
DOVE | Real Beauty Redefined for the AI Era | 2025
20 years ago, Dove fought against the idea of "beauty" in advertising. This time, the enemy is AI. The "beautiful women" that generative AI spits out turned out to be the same narrow, mostly white, thin ideal all over again. What Dove did this time wasn't complain—it was re-educate the algorithm.
LVMH | THE PARTNERSHIP THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING | 2025
The Olympics doesn't let brands put logos in the competition areas. LVMH paid 150 million euros, and instead of placing a logo anywhere, it chose to become the Games themselves.
VIATRIS | MAKE LOVE LAST | 2025
This is a condom ad—actually, no, it's an ad for Viagra. And it doesn't even look like an ad. In China, you can't advertise medicine directly, so this piece was released into the world as a work of "art."
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.
THE NEW ZEALAND HERPES FOUNDATION | THE BEST PLACE TO HAVE HERPES | 2025
A former All Blacks coach says it with total sincerity: sheep numbers are down, meat pies are pricier, and the only way left to restore the country's pride is to become number one in the world at herpes. By the time this thing picked up two Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, it was official — this story is not sane.
DOVE | Real Beauty: How a Soap Brand Created a Global Self-Esteem Movement | 2025
An ad for soap has spent 20 years picking a fight with the definition of "beautiful." In 2025, it won three Grand Prix at Cannes. This isn't really an ad campaign anymore—it's bigger than that.
NATURA | The Amazon Greenventory | 2025
The assumption that the only way to profit from the Amazon is to cut down its trees? Drones and AI just proved that wrong.
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.
PENNY | PRICE PACKS | 2025
In an age when prices feel impossible to predict, PENNY put the price itself—not quality claims—front and center on its packaging. In German food advertising, where touting quality is the norm, this was a pretty bold bet.
UN LIVE, SPOTIFY | SOUNDS RIGHT | 2025
On Earth Day 2024, a brand-new artist called "NATURE" showed up on Spotify. Ocean waves, birdsong, the rustle of a rainforest. Every time one of her songs gets played, she earns royalties, and that money goes straight into conservation. The campaign was built by UN Live and Spotify together with AKQA Copenhagen, and it won the Grand Prix in the Innovation category at Cannes in 2025.
BUDWEISER | ONE SECOND ADS | 2025
The very first note is all it takes to know the song. That feeling every music fan has was turned straight into an ad. Budweiser's "ONE SECOND ADS," an ad from Brazil, won the Grand Prix in the Audio & Radio category at Cannes Lions 2025.
APPLE | AirPods Pro 2 Hearing Aid Feature | 2025
Earbuds became an FDA-cleared hearing aid. What's interesting is that it's the product itself winning the award, not an ad.
Vaseline | Vaseline Verified | 2025
A project that took all 3.5 million ways people use Vaseline on social media and tested every single one in a lab. The first time Vaseline has done anything like this in 155 years, and it won a Titanium Lion at Cannes.
Nikka Whisky | No Labels | 2025
They peeled the labels off the bottles. And they peeled the assumptions off people, too. That's the moment whisky became a way of living.
Nike | So Win | 2025
After 27 years away, Nike returned to Super Bowl advertising, and this time it lined up some of today's top women athletes: Caitlin Clark, Sha'Carri Richardson, A'ja Wilson, and more. The line: "You can't win. So win."
Battleground Mobile India | The Great In-Game Wedding | 2025
Meet in the game, marry in the game. On BGMI's battleground Pochinki, a couple held a real three-day Indian wedding, complete with Mehendi, Sangeet and Phere. Two hundred million people watched what became "India's Biggest In-Game Wedding."
IKEA | HIDDEN TAGS | 2025
IKEA furniture has a hidden tag that disappears once it's assembled. On it: the manufacturing date. From that one fact alone, IKEA pulled off a treasure hunt that got all of Portugal involved.
AnNahar (Lebanon newspaper) | Active Journalism | 2025
Lebanon is a country that failed to choose a president 14 times in two years. So a long-established newspaper took action. It put forward an AI, trained on 90 years of its own articles, as a presidential candidate.
Chicago Deaf Society | Caption with Intention | 2025
From 1971 to 2025, captions were always white. Nobody ever questioned it. Learning this story, I felt ashamed of my own lazy thinking.
Virgin Media O2 | Daisy vs Scammers | 2025
Meet Daisy, a 78-year-old AI grandma built for one job only: keeping scammers on the line as long as possible. She loves knitting, talking about her cat, and never, ever hanging up.
DSP Mutual Fund | Garuda Rakshak | 2025
In 2025, 663 million people gathered for India's Kumbh Mela. In past events, more than 250,000 children had reportedly gone missing, some never reunited with their families. In this crowd where even phones barely worked, DSP Mutual Fund and Dentsu Creative India sent up drones shaped like Garuda.
CHOROGUSAN For Children | The Life-Saving Receipt | 2025
In South Korea, there are about 200,000 children from immigrant families. Vaccines are free for them up to age 12, but only 55.2% actually get vaccinated. This campaign used receipts as a way to deliver the information people needed and try to close that gap.
Colgate | Not Every Smile Starts as a Smile | 2025
A toothpaste ad showing kids crying and throwing tantrums, side by side. Instead of the perfect family photo, it shows the real struggle of getting kids to brush their teeth.
THE RITZ-CARLTON | LATE CHECKOUT: A RITZ-CARLTON STORY | 2025
A four-minute short film made without an ad agency beat out Prada and Tiffany to win Gold in the Luxury category at Cannes. The budget was under $1 million. It was made by just three parties: the hotel brand, a streetwear label, and a production company.
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.
Anthropic | Keep Thinking | 2025
Anthropic ran its first-ever TV ad. The company is growing fast in the business AI world, but barely anyone outside that world knows its name. So the message it chose was: "Keep thinking."
Apple | Shot on iPhone | 2025
"Shot on iPhone" started out as a camera ad for the iPhone 6s and has now run for 10 years, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes Lions in 2025. It's a textbook example of a long-running brand campaign.
WhatsApp | Baatan Hi Baatan Mein (Love in a Few Words) | 2025
How do you reach people who can't read with technology? WhatsApp's answer was to load a 9-minute film onto a truck and tour it village by village.
HYUNDAI | TREE CORRESPONDENTS | 2025
Giving trees a voice sounds like a clever idea right off the bat. But what they actually did was the opposite: they simply made it possible for humans to hear what trees were already saying. Deforestation is one of the causes of global warming, yet it only gets 5% of climate coverage. So they made trees into "correspondents."
TIDE | Collateral Stain Stories | 2025
To prove it had the strongest detergent around, Tide went looking for the toughest stains out there—and ended up at Marvel. But instead of targeting the heroes, they went after the people in the background who get messed up right alongside them.
SICKKIDS FOUNDATION | THE COUNT | 2025
It's a film celebrating a 150th anniversary, but what you see isn't the hospital's history—it's kids running with everything they've got. What's being celebrated isn't the past, it's the next birthday.
ACKO | TAILOR TEST | 2025
An Indian tailor finds the risk of heart disease with nothing but a measuring tape. He measures your waist and hips, and if something seems off, he quietly stamps the bill. On the stamp is a phone number for a free checkup. This is what an insurance company did before it ever tried to sell insurance.