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68 articles
PEDIGREE | CARAMELO | 2026
There's an ad that went as far as genetic research to create a "breed" for mixed-breed dogs with no official pedigree certificate. Its name: Caramelo. That brown mixed-breed dog you see on streets all over Brazil.
HEINEKEN | COULD HAVE BEEN A HEINEKEN | 2026
Forward a voice message longer than 3 minutes, and it turns into a free beer. Riffing on the old "this could have been an email" complaint about meetings, Heineken came up with its own version: "this could have been a beer."
HEINZ | LOOK FAMILIAR? | 2026
Fry boxes around the world turn out to be shaped exactly like the Heinz logo. Nobody ever pointed this out, but once you see it, you can't unsee it.
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.
INDIAN RAILWAYS | Lucky Yatra | 2025
Fare-dodging was costing Indian Railways $800 million a year. Their answer wasn't tougher enforcement. It was turning tickets into lottery tickets.
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.
IDOMED | NIGRUM CORPUS | 2025
"If racism is a disease, the cure is education." To bring that idea to life, a Brazilian medical education institute didn't make a video or a social campaign — they made a book.
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.
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."
Apple TV+ | Severance Grand Central Activation | 2025
In January 2025, a glass box appeared at Grand Central Terminal. Inside were the cast of Severance. Right in the middle of rush-hour commuting, the show's office had suddenly materialized in real life.
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.
PlayStation | Project: MEMORY CARD | 2025
For PlayStation's 30th anniversary, the star wasn't the brand—it was players' memories. 26,000 submissions became a single song, thanks to YOASOBI.
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.
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.
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.
大塚製薬 | THE DAY #C105 | 2025
Just hearing the phrase "load-in day" at Comiket makes my heart beat a little faster. This ad captures that day through the lens of health management.
サントリーホールディングス | 天然水「大自然を味方に」篇 | 2025
There's a scene where someone opens a bottle cap, but the product packaging stays blurry the whole time. And somehow, nobody minds. All eyes are glued to a small figure running down a mountain trail.
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.
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.
Pedigree | 2024
Turning dim, dingy shelter photos into images that look like professional studio shots, with a little help from AI. Pedigree's "Adoptable," created by Colenso BBDO in New Zealand, won the Grand Prix in the Outdoor category at Cannes Lions 2024.
Magnum Ice Cream | 2024
Selling ice cream in the dead of winter. Magnum and LOLA Madrid took on that uphill battle—and came home with a Grand Prix from Cannes.
British Airways | 2024
No logo. No text. No QR code. British Airways' outdoor ad "Windows" doesn't show the view from the plane window—it shows only the faces of passengers looking at that view.
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.
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.
Coors Light | Coors Lights Out | 2023
In August 2023, a foul ball from Shohei Ohtani smashed an LED module on a Coors Light sign at Citi Field. A black dot of missing pixels appeared right above the can. Normally this would end with a quiet "sorry, we'll fix it," but Rethink turned it into a commemorative can recreating that black square — released just 48 hours later. It's reaction marketing at its finest.
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.
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.
DOORDASH | Self-Love Bouquet | 2023
Eleven roses arrive for Valentine's Day, and the 12th is "Rose™" — the rose-shaped sex toy that went viral on TikTok. DoorDash slipped it into bouquets and sold them. They sold out in three days and won the Grand Prix in PR at Cannes Lions.
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.
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.
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.
BURGER KING | NONARTIFICAL MEXICO | 2022
No models, no hair and makeup, no beautiful locations. Just black-and-white photos of ordinary people on Mexican streets, biting into a burger. Those photos became billboards — and even made it into a museum.
HEINEKEN | SHUTTER ADS | 2020
In 2020, the pandemic forced bars to pull down their shutters. The lights went out across the city. So why not put those shutters to work bringing the light back?
Apple | Macの向こうから — まだこの世界にない物語を | 2020
They made an entire 30-second commercial out of nothing but scenes of anime characters sitting down at their Macs. And get this — some of those Macs have logos that are clearly not the real Apple logo, turned into a heart or a pear instead, yet Apple included them anyway. That kind of generosity really shows the brand's sheer confidence.
BECO | #STEALOURSTAFF | 2020
"Please steal our staff." BECO printed résumés right on their bottles and put them on the shelves of major supermarkets. Getting poached is usually every company's nightmare—but BECO made it happen on purpose.
NETFLIX | 人間まるだし。 | 2020
The narration opens with a sarcastic line: "What a beautiful age we live in." In 2019, when everyone was burning with "correctness," Netflix brought out The Naked Director and declared, flat out, "Human, Exposed." The moment Shibuya turned entirely red, you could feel just how powerful this ad was.
BURGER KING | THE MOLDY WHOPPER | 2020
A burger covered in mold became one of the most beautiful ads in the world. In 2020, Burger King released footage of a Whopper rotting over 35 days, with the tagline "The Beauty of No Artificial Preservatives." It broke a food-advertising taboo head-on.
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.
MUMBAI POLICE | THE PUNISHING SIGNAL | 2020
The more you honk, the longer the light stays red. Mumbai, one of the noisiest cities in the world, built a traffic signal that punishes honking itself.
TOYOTA | START YOUR IMPOSSIBLE | 2019
The car disappeared from Toyota's global campaign. What's shown instead: wheelchairs, robotic prosthetic legs, support robots. A car maker made an ad that doesn't show a car.