Industry
20 articles
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.
ASDRA | ABSURD PROMISES | 2024
During Argentina's 2023 presidential election, candidates were making grand, nearly impossible promises, but not one of them said a word about people with disabilities. People with Down syndrome, in particular, were bound by an absurd law: even though their genetic condition never changes, they had to renew their disability certificate every single year or lose their rights. To expose this contradiction, VML and ASDRA started tweeting a certain index in real time during a live presidential debate.
UN WOMEN | Child Wedding Cards | 2024
A budget under $1,500. No AI. No celebrities. No special effects. Just wedding invitations drawn by girls aged 5 to 15. They sent them to members of parliament—and the law changed.
B3 STOCK EXCHANGE & UNITED NATIONS GLOBAL COMPACT | EART4 | 2023
Earth became a company. And one on the verge of bankruptcy, no less. At first I had no idea what that even meant. But it turns out this was the perfect "translation" for business leaders.
POLYCAM X UNESCO | BACKUP UKRAINE | 2022
In 2022, Russian bombing threatened to wipe out not just lives in Ukraine, but also the sculptures and churches that had watched over its cities for centuries. So creators from the ad industry came up with an idea: turn the smartphone everyone already owns into a tool for protecting cultural treasures.
THE BIG ISSUE & LINKEDIN | Raising Profiles | 2020
A homeless magazine seller signs up for LinkedIn. As a response to the pandemic, you couldn't ask for a more logical idea.
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.
SANDY HOOK PROMISE | Back to School Essentials | 2020
A cheerful back-to-school shopping scene slowly turns into a nightmare over 66 seconds. Binders and shoes are, for American kids, just tools to survive school — and this ad hits you with that reality when you least expect it.
REGENT PARK SCHOOL OF MUSIC | PARKSCAPES | 2020
Instead of "receiving" donations, why not "earn" them? Kids learning music ended up standing on the same ground as the pros who make a living from it.
MARCH FOR OUR LIVES PARKLAND STUDENTS | Price on Our Lives | 2018
$1.05. That's the total amount Senator Marco Rubio received from the NRA, divided by the total number of students in Florida. It's the orange price tag that survivors of the Parkland high school shooting wore as the "price" of their own lives. The campaign generated 826 media placements and 2.2 billion media impressions, and through the power of math, anger, and design, it irreversibly changed the gun control debate in America.
BLINK TO SPEAK - | Blink To Speak | 2018
A language made for people who can only move their eyes. Even when ALS or a spinal injury takes away control of the rest of the body, the eyes keep moving until the very end. This gave those eyes words to speak with.
CHILD FOCUS | Coins of Hope | 2017
The king's face stamped on a coin was replaced with the face of a missing child, and the coin was put into real circulation. Nobody noticed as they spent it—until that one coin waited for the moment someone's eyes would finally land on it.
RED CROSS | SOS SMS | 2015
Just type "*SOS" on your phone's lock screen, and paramedics can instantly pull up your medical conditions and blood type. It sounds small, but that one line can be the difference between life and death.
UN WOMEN | THE AUTOCOMPLETE TRUTH | 2014
Type "women should" into Google's search box, and it fills in the rest with words of discrimination. This wasn't any one person's opinion—it was the answer pulled straight from everyone's search history.
ALS FOUNDATION NETHERLANDS | I Have Already Died | 2012
"Not for me. Because I'm already dead." On screen, people speak plainly, directly to the camera. The weight of this campaign comes from one fact: by the time it aired, every single one of them was already gone.
SCOPE | SEE THE PERSON | 2011
In the darkness, rock music rings out. Then the lights come up on the members of a six-person band, Rudely Interrupted. The music tells you first, before anything else, that five of them are living with disability.
THE TOPSY FOUNDATION | SELINAH | 2010
Just playing the footage in reverse, that's it. But when I heard they kept the camera rolling every single day for 90 days to make that work, I was speechless.
AIDES | GRAFFITI | 2010
The hero of this ad is a single graffiti penis scrawled on a bathroom wall. An ad with genitals as the main character isn't something you see every day.
UNICEF | TAP PROJECT | 2007
Esquire magazine challenged the creatives it named to its "Best and Brightest" list to build a brand using just one page of the magazine. What David Droga came up with wasn't an ad at all — it was a mechanism that changed the world.
UNITED CEREBRAL PALSY FUND | Have a Cigar | 1969
A husband holds out a cigar to his newborn baby. It looks like a casual gesture, but hidden in it is a story about cerebral palsy. This is Have a Cigar, Grand Prix winner at the 1969 Cannes Lions.