Emotion
329 articles
ROCKET | Own the Dream | 2025
The moment the Super Bowl commercial ended, 65,000 people in the stadium started singing. Millions of people watching on TV hummed along too. It wasn't the commercial, and it wasn't the halftime show—it was a 15-second live singalong that slipped right into the broadcast. Both the NFL and FOX had initially said it couldn't be done.
CORONA | SUN RESERVE | 2025
For its 100th anniversary, Corona did something unheard of: it turned the sun itself into a protected reserve. Usually when you hear "reserve," you think forests or oceans — nobody protects the sun. And the way they pulled it off was a total legal hack.
BILLBOARD ARABIA | THE SECOND RELEASE | 2025
Bringing back a forgotten diva with AI. And timing it to Saudi Arabia's National Day, no less. The moment I heard this, my first thought was "wait, is this a good idea?" But the result was a Cannes Lions Gold - in a category where only 0.78% of all entries win.
HERALBONY | HERALBONY Art Prize | 2025
A venture company from Iwate won Gold at Cannes Lions, in the "Glass: The Lion for Change" category. This is the story of HERALBONY, a company that has treated art by artists with intellectual disabilities not as charity, but as business.
RENAULT | UN.PATENT | 2025
Renault opened up its patent for extinguishing electric vehicle fires for free, even to rival manufacturers. Instead of locking the technology away, as companies usually do, they let the whole thing go.
カロリーメイト | 狭い広い世界で | 2024
Through the screen of a smartphone, someone had been watching a whole year in the life of a student preparing for exams. The 2019 song "Boku no Koto" gets a new orchestral arrangement, and all three members of Mrs. GREEN APPLE even make cameo appearances.
earth music&ecology | いいことある服。 | 2024
To mark its 25th anniversary, earth music&ecology has gone all in on the word "purpose." After spending about a year with everyone involved rethinking what makes the brand "itself," they landed on this film: a woman wakes to her morning alarm, touches her clothes, and finds herself surrounded by flowers and butterflies. Honestly, I have no idea where I'm supposed to feel excited.
今西数英教室 | 一生忘れない塾。 | 2024
Every year's ad from this brand is good. But this "Song Edition" is on another level.
MASTERCARD | ROOM FOR EVERYONE | 2024
Two years after the war began, support among Polish people for Ukrainian refugees had dropped to 52%. As Ukrainians came to account for 10% of new businesses opening, they started being seen, almost without anyone noticing, as "competitors." This campaign used data to turn that mood around.
富士フイルム | あしたに続く写真 | 2024
Kazu, Furuta, and Tulio each look back at their past while gazing at old photos. Not every meaningful photo needs a dramatic story behind it, but a single picture that captures a true turning point in someone's life carries a weight that words just can't match.
カロリーメイト | 光も影も | 2024
The tenth installment in the series, and the first time an art school exam candidate took the lead role. Boys had taken the lead four years running, from '19 to '22, so longtime fans who'd been thinking "maybe it's a girl's turn soon" couldn't help but grin.
アクエリアス | NEW YOU キャンペーン 泳げるようになりたい | 2024
This is a video following a 75-year-old grandmother over 30 days, starting from when she could barely even put her face in the water, as she works toward swimming 25 meters freestyle. It's lovely to see swimmer Kosuke Kitajima coaching her wholeheartedly, showing that age doesn't matter when you want to swim. But what really makes this commercial so moving isn't that part.
SIEMENS HEALTHINEERS | Magnetic Stories（The Flying Train） | 2024
The roar of an MRI machine—louder than a military jet—was transformed so kids would hear robots, flying trains, and spaceships instead. That's just not fair (in the best way).
PHILIPS | REFURB (Better Than New) | 2024
Stop selling new products, and sell only repaired ones instead. That's the decision Philips made, and it won a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. This isn't a story about a clever ad idea — it's about changing the way a company actually sells things.
SOL CEMENT | SIGHTWALKS | 2024
This is what happened when a cement company thought hard about what cement could actually do. Tap your cane on the ground, and the number of lines carved into the tile tells you what's there: "this is a bank," "this is a pharmacy." Two lines mean a bank, three mean a grocery store, four mean a pharmacy. Laid across the streets of Lima, Peru, it lets blind people walk the city on their own.
HEINZ | IT HAS TO BE HEINZ | 2024
Ask an AI to draw ketchup, and a Heinz bottle shows up on its own. Ask a person, same result. Behind the scenes at restaurants, fake ketchup gets refilled into Heinz bottles. The work that spent five years collecting proof of this blindingly obvious fact won the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at Cannes in 2024.
DOVE | CODE MY CROWN | 2024
85% of Black gamers say they don't see their own hair represented in video games. Dove's response wasn't an ad—it was a 200-page technical guide.
PETPACE | ANIMAL ALERTS | 2024
Earthquakes can't be predicted, even with today's most advanced science. But dogs might be able to do what science can't. "ANIMAL ALERTS," launched in Lima, Peru, is the world's first early warning system that uses dogs' physical data to predict earthquakes.
高橋酒造 | 生きてくだけで冒険だ。 | 2024
"Just live freely," they say—but nothing is scarier than freedom. A sake maker in Kumamoto addresses this line to young people, and it's an opening that doesn't feel like a typical liquor commercial at all. The idea of comparing life to an RPG never feels cheap—instead, it comes through as hope.
DP WORLD | THE MOVE TO -15 | 2024
Frozen shipping containers have been kept at -18°C for 100 years. Nobody ever questioned that number—until DP World asked "why?" By raising it just three degrees, they got an entire industry moving.
DEGIRO & UN WOMEN | Pink Chip | 2024
When a woman becomes CEO, the stock price drops 2 to 3%. According to Harvard researchers, the reason is bias against women. Even though companies led by women perform better in both earnings and stock performance, the stock still falls. A tool was created to fight back against this contradiction with data.
日本マクドナルド | スマイルあげない | 2024
McDonald's broke its own 50-year-old promise of a "0 Yen Smile," all by itself. "I Won't Give You a Smile," sung by ano, was a recruitment campaign on the surface, but underneath it was a declaration of resolve.
ソニー・ミュージックレーベルズ | 何色でもない花 | 2024
Utada Hikaru dancing in a pure white world was so beautiful it had me within the first 30 seconds.
BANCO DEL PACÍFICO | GAMER LOAN | 2024
Skins and items as collateral. Eight out of ten young people in Ecuador don't own a car or a house, so they can't get a loan. But they do have a game account they've poured hundreds of hours into. A bank showed up and said that account has real value.
朝日放送テレビ | M-1グランプリ2023×日食なつこ「ログマロープ」 | 2024
There are manzai comedians who stake their whole lives on four minutes. Playing over the promotional video for M-1 Grand Prix 2023 is Natsuko Nisshoku's "Logma Rope." She couldn't write a song for six months, and this track was born at the end of what felt like hell.
HEINEKEN | BAR EXPERIENCE | 2024
Turning "bar work experience" into an official LinkedIn credential badge that's actually recognized by 25 companies, including Coca-Cola and McDonald's, when they hire. Heineken built this wonderfully absurd (but completely serious) system.
日本マクドナルド | 特別じゃない、しあわせな時間。 | 2024
No dialogue, 20 seconds long, and just the folk song "Akatonbo" playing. That's all there is to this video—and it's been watched over 100 million times worldwide. Nothing really happens, yet something about it hits you. That's the kind of ad this is.
FILSA COLOMBIA | FILTER CAPS | 2024
Just snap a cap weighing only 24g, made from cornstarch, onto a bottle, and cloudy water from a pond or well turns into drinking water. This isn't just advertising — the water actually changes.
KOREAN NATIONAL POLICE AGENCY | Knock Knock | 2023
Inspired by Morse code, this emergency reporting system lets people ask for help without saying a word. Just tap the screen, and the police know where you are. It's the first change to Korea's emergency reporting system in 65 years — the sound of a knock.
SKINNY | Phone It In | 2023
No ad budget? Then let amateurs make the ad. Even better, let your competitor's customers make it. The fact that this kind of shameless move can win the Cannes Lions Grand Prix just goes to show how interesting the world is.
MEMORIAL SLOAN KETTERING CANCER CENTER | Working with Cancer | 2023
We're living in an age where one in two people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. But what's truly frightening might not be the disease itself—it's being found out at work. The fear of losing your job gets tangled up with the fear of losing your life.
APPLE | THE GREATEST | 2023
Seven people with disabilities drive a car, check the color of their clothes, and just go about their day, all using iPhone. That's it, that's the whole film. And it swept the Emmys, the Cannes Grand Prix, D&AD, and One Club Best in Show. The amazing part isn't the advertising. It's the people in it.
クラシエホームプロダクツ | 日本の四季 | 2023
A camera slowly circles a cherry tree as the seasons pass by. There's a commercial that took over 80 days to shoot, all for this one tree. The moment I heard about the plan, I thought, "This is going to be tough" — and I found myself admiring the trust it took to actually pull it off.
マクドナルド | 家族といっしょに。「約束のハッピーセット」篇 | 2023
All I cared about was "what's in the Happy Meal right now," but the opening shot already had me hooked. A 60-second ad where the setting, the cast, and the direction all click together perfectly.
EUROFARMA | SCROLLING THERAPY | 2023
Parkinson's disease slowly erases facial expressions. People lose the ability to smile, to look surprised. But this app turns the scrolling time everyone already wastes every day into a tool for getting those muscles back.
RENAULT | PLUG-INN | 2023
Is it an ad, or is it a business? Renault's "PLUG-INN" came to smash that whole line apart. It took the Grand Prix in the Creative Strategy category at Cannes Lions 2023.
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.
ＡCジャパン | 寛容ラップ | 2023
At a convenience store checkout, an old woman fumbles through her coins. A tough-looking rapper starts stomping his foot. Uh oh, you think, bracing for trouble—then he grabs an ice cream bar like a microphone and starts rapping: "Nobody's mad at you. Take all the time you need." A rap battle with no disses—now that's an invention.
大塚製薬 | スカフィンのうた | 2023
A returnable bottle's journey, told in paper-cut animation and song. Kaho Nakamura's voice is gentle, Moji Tsuchiya's paper cuts, pieced together one second a day, are so lovable that by the end you kind of want to return a bottle yourself.
MAKRO | LIFE EXTENDING STICKERS | 2023
Those tiny stickers on fruit? They turned them into a medium. That alone cut Colombia's food waste by 70 tons a week. This might be the ultimate example of how small an ad can be and still work.
INTEL | CERTIFIED HUMAN | 2023
A technology that can expose a deepfake in an instant, just by looking at the blood flow in someone's face. Intel turned this into a real ad campaign.
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.
JR東海 | 会うって、特別だったんだ。 | 2022
In 1988, Eri Fukatsu waited on a station platform for her boyfriend. In 2022, she had become a businesswoman taking the bullet train to Osaka on a work trip. JR Central quietly captured these 33 years of change in just 60 seconds.
キングソフト | WPS Cloud「働き方を自由にする」篇 | 2022
A man with two faces: special agent and office worker. While carrying out a mission to rescue a hostage from a burning, collapsing building, he gets a call from a coworker at his IT company, and right there on the spot he finishes editing a document using WPS Cloud. The sheer amount packed into 30 seconds is incredible.
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.
DECATHLON | THE BREAKAWAY | 2022
Six inmates at a maximum-security prison in Belgium go cycling in a virtual space with people from the outside world. That single sentence was enough to move me.
一般社団法人ABJ | STOP! 海賊版「ありがとう、君の漫画愛。」 | 2022
I cried so hard it hurt. That was my first reaction, and it still is.
MARS | HOPE REEF | 2022
A cat food company planted letters on the ocean floor. H-O-P-E. Visible from space, on Google Earth. And made of living coral.