Year
45 articles
Getty Images | From Love to Bingo | 2016
What do you even show in an ad for stock photos? The answer: shoot a movie using nothing but photos. By stringing together 873 still images, they packed love, family, bingo—basically all of life—into one minute.
三菱自動車 | Heart-Beat Motors | 2015
Cars that make your heart race, cars that make you excited. That's really the heart of it, isn't it—something that stirs your instincts. Honestly, I think it's fine for cars to be about that.
HONDA | 試す人になろう | 2015
This ad just seemed to appear out of nowhere. It runs 120 seconds, calmly showing people working at Honda's research facility, nothing more. And yet somehow it has this strange power to make you think, "I want to work here."
BGH | Dads in Briefs | 2015
Summer in Argentina is brutally hot. Without air conditioning, dads at home start wandering around in nothing but their underwear. It's every family's worst nightmare. BGH turned this exact phenomenon into an ad.
江崎グリコ | オトナグリコ アーモンドピーク | 2015
This ad turns a pitch competition between ad agencies into the ad itself. Nanako Matsushima and Satoshi Tsumabuki play creative directors from rival agencies, fighting over Glico's business, in this behind-the-scenes story. You get a peek into the industry (surely exaggerated quite a bit), and that alone makes it fun to watch.
東京ディズニーリゾート | Where dreams come true 夢はつづく | 2015
You see a lot of commercials these days that fast-forward through someone's whole life, but this Disney one really stuck with me. It's all animation, and the fact that it manages to capture one woman's entire life in just 30 seconds is enough to bring tears to your eyes.
Honda | 負けるもんか | 2015
"Effort doesn't pay off. Dreams don't come true. So what?" I still remember how many people this corporate ad moved when it came out. In just 60 seconds, it lines up generations of Honda cars and motorcycles at Twin Ring Motegi, and through them, the spirit of Soichiro Honda comes through as one powerful message.
SPCA | DRIVING DOGS | 2013
Dogs driving a car. Sounds like a joke, but they actually pulled it off. To prove that shelter dogs are smart, they went this far.
Coca-Cola | Security Cameras | 2013
It wasn't until my third watch that I realized how clever it was to use security camera footage this way — the first time, I just cried, plain and simple.
THE GUARDIAN | Three Little Pigs | 2012
What happens if you drop the fairy tale of the Three Little Pigs into today's news environment? The Guardian turned its answer into a two-minute film. It gives me chills every time I watch it.
AXE “EXCITE” | Excite - Even Angels Will Fall | 2012
An angel descends from the sky. Beautiful angels in white robes and halos walk through a small town, and in front of one man, they smash their halos. "AXE can make even angels fall." This is the work that won the Grand Prix in the Creative Effectiveness category at Cannes Lions in 2012.
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.
DEUTSCHE AIDS-STIFTUNG | EVERY 18 SECONDS SOMEBODY DIES OF AIDS. | 2012
Eighteen seconds. That's how often someone, somewhere in the world, dies of AIDS. As a number, it's almost too short. And almost too heavy to bear.
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.
GO OUTSIDE MAGAZINE | REPELLENT RADIO | 2012
A radio station in São Paulo secretly mixed a 15kHz tone into its music programming from 6 to 8pm. Humans can't hear it. But mosquitoes can. Since it mimics the sound of a dragonfly's wings—a mosquito's natural predator—the mosquitoes flee. Just by having the radio on, you get bug protection.
BAND-AID | MAGIC VISION | 2012
The instant a kid starts to cry from a scrape, Kermit pops up right on the Band-Aid and starts singing. Just hold up your phone, and an ordinary bandage turns into a tiny stage.
UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON | UNHATE | 2012
Obama and Hu Jintao. Netanyahu and Abbas. The Pope and an imam, kissing. The moment these posters went up in cities, the world reacted. Within hours the Vatican was furious, calling it a "grave lack of respect," and the poster of the Pope was taken down. That reaction was probably part of the plan all along.
COCA-COLA | Polar Bowl | 2012
On Super Bowl night, more than 700,000 people watched polar bears instead of the actual game. Isn't that wild?
VOLKSWAGEN | DON'T MAKE UP AND DRIVE | 2012
You're watching a tutorial on how to do your makeup, when suddenly you hear a car crash and the screen shakes. That's the one-minute video VOLKSWAGEN put out on YouTube in 2012.
読売新聞 | 僕の走れなかった道 | 2012
"When we were kids, everyone wanted to be an athlete." That opening line feels like it could spark real debate. But Yomiuri Shimbun ran with it anyway. And that's exactly where the strength of this campaign lies.
ASOS | Urban Tour | 2012
Click on a dancer, and everyone around them freezes while that one person keeps moving. Then you can buy what they're wearing. Incredibly simple, and incredibly new for its time.
MINISTRY OF TOURISM GOVT. OF INDIA | THE HINGLISH PROJECT | 2012
In India, mixing Hindi and English together into "Hinglish" is just a normal part of how people talk. So someone decided to turn that into a font.
CHIPOTLE | CULTIVATE CAMPAIGN (Back to the Start) | 2012
A fast food chain made an animated short attacking factory farming. The product never once appears on screen. And it still won two Grand Prix at Cannes. That's almost too bold to believe.
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.
MERCEDES BENZ | THE INVISIBLE DRIVE | 2012
This piece won the Grand Prix in the Outdoor category at Cannes Lions in 2012, and the first time I saw it, I just went "wait, what?" A car that's transparent — what does that even mean? But it really is see-through. Literally.
Metro Trains Melbourne | Dumb Ways to Die | 2012
I believe this one swept multiple Grand Prix categories at Cannes, and I ended up watching it so many times I nearly died. It got me thinking there must be some kind of formula for a film that can withstand being watched over and over. Music is probably a huge part of it, and this campaign has an incredibly good song. Which makes me realize that ad planners can't just be experts in how a film scene is crafted—they also need to know music inside and out. It really is a total art form. Amazing stuff.
MERCEDES BENZ | REUNION | 2012
The title is "REUNION." This Mercedes film was made in 2012 by BBDO Johannesburg in South Africa, and it won Gold.
TROY PUBLIC LIBRARY | Book Burning Party | 2012
Signs went up around town announcing a "book burning party." Everyone was furious. But that anger was exactly the plan to save the library.
TNT | Push to Add Drama (A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square) | 2012
The brief was simple: make a launch campaign people would talk about. So TNT set up a red button in an ordinary town square with a sign that said "Push to Add Drama." Then they just waited.
ETERNA CADENCIA | THE BOOK THAT CAN'T WAIT | 2012
There's a book that starts erasing itself the moment you open it. Printed with a special ink that fades after a few months of exposure to light and air, this is a book you simply have to read.
CHIPOTLE | Back to the Start | 2012
For 2 minutes and 20 seconds, it just talks about farms. No burritos, no smiling staff, not even the product name shows up. For a fast food ad, that's incredibly strange. And yet it ended up winning two Grand Prix at Cannes.
CANAL+ | THE BEAR | 2012
A bearskin rug lying on a living room floor becomes a Hollywood film director. It sounds ridiculous written out like that, but this became the most awarded ad in Gunn Report history in 2012.
TOYOTA | BACKSEAT DRIVER | 2012
A kid in the backseat who used to just whine "are we there yet?" now grips their own steering wheel inside an iPhone app that's linked by GPS to the real car. Boring travel time spent just tracing a parent's driving got turned into a whole game.
NIKE | I AM PLAYR | 2012
There's a game where you live a footballer's life in the first person. Nike was woven into that story as if it were simply part of life — and over 400,000 pairs of boots got sold inside the game. It never feels like advertising, but that's exactly what it is.
DORITOS | DIPS DESPERADO | 2012
Only 1 in 10 people in the UK were dipping their chips. To move that number, AMV BBDO invented a legendary Mexican who never existed.
SEAWEED | DESIGN NORI | 2012
Using a laser cutter to etch patterns into sheets of nori that hadn't changed in 500 years. The idea of designing the product itself, not the package, was a total blind spot.
THE PERES CENTER FOR PEACE | Blood Relations | 2012
Enemies, sharing each other's blood.
P&G | Thank You, Mom – Best Job | 2012
At the 2012 London Olympics, P&G called itself the "Proud Sponsor of Moms" — the official sponsor of mothers everywhere.
SNOOP DOGG | Rolling Words | 2012
You read a book, then light up the page and smoke it. Who else but Snoop Dogg could get away with an idea this wild?
GOOGLE | Voice Search | 2012
In 2012, more than 150 oddly spelled billboards popped up on the streets of London. Outside subway stations, mysterious strings of letters that looked like station names. Outside a stadium, something like "ley-tist-skohrz." Read them out loud, and suddenly they make sense. This was an ad for Google's voice search.
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.
NOKIA | MYSTERY AD | 2012
You're sure you're using an iPhone, but suddenly the screen turns into Windows Phone. You're sure you're on Android, but somehow it's now Nokia's interface. This "impossible experience" was built as an actual mobile ad format. Winning Gold at Cannes Lions Mobile in 2012, this trick stands out both for the boldness of targeting competitors' users directly, and for the technical precision needed to pull it off.
GOOGLE | All Is Not Lost | 2012
A browser window splits into 12 pieces, each one moving on its own, somehow coming together into a single dance. And at the end, it spells out the words you typed, using its feet. When I saw this in 2011, I literally shivered, thinking, "wait, the internet can still do this?"
HELP REMEDIES | Help I Want to Save a Life | 2012
Open up a bandage, and inside is a bone marrow donor registration kit. The blood from your cut finger, just as it is, might be enough to save a life.
NIKE+ | FuelBand | 2012
This isn't an ad. But an ad agency made it. That contradiction is exactly why it won two Grand Prix at Cannes.