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32 articles
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.
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.
Duolingo | Duo's Death / Revive Duo | 2025
On February 11, 2025, Duolingo's green owl died. X's for eyes, tongue lolling out. Normally, killing off your own mascot would be a PR disaster. But this was actually the start of a "resurrection" that racked up 1.7 billion impressions.
SPECSAVERS | THE MISHEARD VERSION | 2024
They had Rick Astley re-record "Never Gonna Give You Up" with the lyrics deliberately swapped for commonly misheard versions, then released it with no explanation at all. It got 20 million plays in 8 hours. At Cannes it won six Lions and two Grand Prix. It was the first time a PR agency had won the PR Lions Grand Prix on its own.
RUH FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIP | The National Sport of Kazakhstan | 2024
A ring where men and women fight each other? Unthinkable, the men raged. But inside their own homes, they said nothing. RUH Fighting Championship exposed that silence.
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.
GUNS DOWN AMERICA | GUN SURVIVOR REVIEWS | 2022
A gun review video on YouTube. Specs, performance, how it feels to handle. It plays out just like any other review. But this reviewer actually survived being shot by that exact gun.
WOMEN IN GAMES | GENDER SWAP | 2022
Male heroes swinging their hips, dancing seductively, striking provocative poses. Taking the movements that have long been treated as "normal" for female characters in games and transplanting them directly onto male characters suddenly makes them feel deeply strange.
POPEYES LOUISIANA KITCHEN | CHICKEN WARS | 2020
In August 2019, a tweet of just 15 characters shook up the restaurant industry. The story goes that a chicken sandwich — ten weeks' worth of stock — sold out in just eight days.
CITY OF CHICAGO | Boards of Change | 2020
In 2020, the plywood covering Chicago's streets was reborn as voting booths. The same boards used to cover broken windows became boxes that deliver votes. That shift alone makes this a powerful idea.
FONDATION DE FRANCE | BEE_INFLUENCER | 2020
I always thought influencers were a human thing. Turns out I was wrong. A bee smaller than an inch gathered 280,000 followers on Instagram and poured the ad money straight into saving her own species. This really happened.
MICROSOFT | The Franchise Model | 2019
There was a site where you could customize your own Xbox controller. People loved designing them, but kept leaving without buying. McCann London found a trick there that boosted sales by 350%.
NIKE | DREAM CRAZY | 2019
A man kneeling became the face of the world's biggest sports brand. An ad that gets people burning Nike products and rushing out to buy new ones at the very same time? That doesn't happen often.
ペディグリー | SelfieSTIX | 2018
You want to take a selfie with your dog, but your dog just won't look at the camera. Pedigree decided to seriously solve this small, everyday problem.
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.
NETFLIX | Spanish Lessons | 2017
Scrolling through Twitter, they noticed fans all tweeting the same thing: "Watching Narcos is teaching me Spanish." So they thought — let's actually turn that into a lesson.
CHEETOS | CHEETOS MUSEUM | 2017
Finding oddly-shaped Cheetos inside the bag, then putting them on display in a museum. This ridiculous idea led to the best sales week in the brand's history.
BAOBEIHUIJIA | Search for Free WiFi, Search for Missing Children | 2015
What if the WiFi network you were about to connect to was named "Help, Find Me"? In China, more than 200,000 children go missing every year, and this was the answer TBWA/Shanghai came up with.
CBC | ABLA FAHITA | 2015
A puppet made for an ad got investigated by the state on terrorism charges, and still went on to win the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes. This actually happened in Egypt.
MICROSOFT ONENOTE | Collective Project | 2015
Showing college students an ad just doesn't land. So Microsoft stopped making ads and instead "did" the story of a student trying to change the world.
Marc Dorcel | #HandsOff | 2015
If you want to watch porn, keep both hands on the keyboard. I had to laugh at that one. A porn site telling you not to let go of the keyboard — that twisted, mischievous logic is just perfect.
BEATS BY DRE | THE PILLS | 2014
A speaker grew arms and legs and started talking. Its voice belonged to the likes of Eminem and Chris Rock — a pretty star-studded mouth.
METROPOLE ORKEST | METROPOLE TWEETPHONY | 2013
A Dutch orchestra on the verge of disappearing due to budget cuts had a full 52-piece orchestra perform a song live that was composed entirely on Twitter. You didn't need an instrument, just 140 characters.
SWEDISH INSTITUTE AND VISIT SWEDEN | CURATORS OF SWEDEN | 2012
Handing the country's official Twitter account to a different ordinary citizen every week. No checking what they tweet. That's the bet Sweden made.
LA REDOUTE | THE NAKED MAN | 2012
On January 4, 2012, French fashion retailer La Redoute posted a photo of kids' clothing that happened to have a fully naked man in the background. People instantly branded it an "epic PR fail" and it spread like wildfire. So what did the agency do? Not apologize — they planted more weird photos all over the site and turned it into a game. This completely backwards decision ended up winning a Gold Lion at Cannes.
BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO BANK | THE MOST POPULAR SONG | 2012
Puerto Rico's biggest hit song was a tune called "I Don't Do Anything" — a song that nationally celebrated not working. This campaign got the very people singing it to rewrite it. That bold move brought Puerto Rico its first-ever Cannes Grand Prix.
UNIQLO | LUCKY LINE | 2011
In 2011, UNIQLO brought the "line" online. Turning that familiar sight of people queuing outside stores from 6 a.m. into a virtual experience on Twitter and Facebook was, at the time, an unheard-of move.
ZOO ANTWERP | BABY ELEPHANT | 2010
An elephant's pregnancy, watched by an entire country. The ultrasound photos, the contractions, the moment of birth. This isn't really an ad—it's the story of everyone coming together to witness a new life.
BEST BUY | TWELPFORCE | 2010
This is the story of the day something that wasn't an advertisement won the Grand Prix at Cannes. I watched the moment customer service turned into advertising.
OBAMA/BIDEN 2008 | OBAMA FOR AMERICA | 2009
At Cannes in 2009, the jury did something no political campaign had ever had done to it before. They gave it two Grand Prix at once, in Titanium and Integrated, and both decisions were unanimous.
GLOBO TV | One Thousand Casmurros | 2009
Split a book into 1,000 pieces and have 1,000 people read it. Who even comes up with that?
BURGER KING | WHOPPER SACRIFICE | 2009
Delete ten friends on Facebook and you get a free Whopper. The person you deleted gets a notification saying 'You have chosen a Whopper over your friend.' It was a bomb CP+B dropped in 2009.