Year
42 articles
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.
WAITROSE & PARTNERS | Sweet Suspicion: A Deliciously Festive Whodunnit | 2025
The star dessert at Christmas dinner has vanished. Every member of the family is a suspect. With Succession's Matthew Macfadyen and Fleabag's Sian Clifford in the cast — an unlikely lineup for a supermarket ad — Waitrose pulled off a surprising two-part mystery.
PARIS 2024 | Olympic Games Opening Ceremony | 2025
No stadium for the opening ceremony. Instead, the stage was 6 kilometers of the Seine River. On 7/26/2024, the athletes traveled down the river on 160 boats. 300,000 people stood along the banks, and 1.5 billion were watching on TV.
Mountain Dew | Play the Dew | 2025
Just by saying "DEW," you can make gunfire, engine roars, explosions — pretty much any sound a game needs. A brand name that doubles as a sound effect? It almost feels too good to be true.
SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE | Play It Safe | 2024
This isn't an ad for condoms. It's a movie made for the Sydney Opera House's 50th anniversary. The title is "Play It Safe," and the lyrics Tim Minchin sings are all about "don't take risks, let's play it safe" — yet the footage thoroughly celebrates "dangerous creativity." That irony works incredibly well.
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.
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).
LOEWE | LOEWE x Suna Fujita | 2024
A husband-and-wife pottery studio in a small town in Kyoto, and LOEWE, the Spanish luxury brand. This pairing won the first-ever Grand Prix in the Luxury & Lifestyle category in Cannes Lions history.
CERAVE | Michael CeraVe | 2024
Roping in an actor whose name just happens to sound similar, growing fake news across the whole country for three weeks, then revealing the truth at the Super Bowl. This is completely unhinged (the highest compliment). The client, Michael Cera, and the 450 influencers who jumped on board - everyone involved is out of their minds.
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.
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.
Coca-Cola | 2024
In bodegas and small shops around the world, owners have been painting their own versions of the Coca-Cola logo. Instead of telling them to fix it, the brand officially celebrated it.
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.
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.
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.
L'Oréal de Puerto Rico | 2024
There was hidden history woven into the way hair is braided.
花王 メリット | 家族と愛とメリット | 2024
The concept and art direction here are just incredible. You can really feel a great team meeting a great client. I ended up buying Merit shampoo, hook, line, and sinker.
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.
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.
Coca-Cola | 2024
Coca-Cola's logo, drawn in the shape of a crushed can. A campaign that boldly crushed the logo everyone assumes is untouchable won the Grand Prix in the Print & Publishing category at Cannes Lions 2024.
SPOTIFY | Spreadbeats | 2024
Try to imagine the moment someone first came up with the idea of making a 4-minute music video in Excel. Somebody definitely laughed and said "that's insane." But that insane idea went on to win a Grand Prix. That's what advertising can be.
SANDOZ DEUTSCHLAND | OTTER | 2024
The radio ad "OTTER" was written by two interns who hadn't even gotten used to their business cards yet. And the subject matter? Poop jokes. Somehow it won a Gold Lion at Cannes.
ERRATA AT 88 - | Errata at 88 | 2024
In 1962, a legendary concert at Carnegie Hall introduced bossa nova to the world. One of its founders, Alaíde Costa, wasn't on that stage. Now 88 years old, she finally got to stand there.
MOVISTAR | THIS IS NOT A GAME | 2024
The person on the other side of the screen might not be a friend. A video that looks like a kids' game walkthrough but keeps telling a horrifying story the whole time.
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.
KRUNGSRI FIRST CHOICE | WHAT THE FAST! | 2024
Making up with a partner. Talking your dad into something. Apologizing to your boss. The most awkward conversations in life, wrapped up in the split second two motorbikes pass each other. Three 15-second films built on that idea won a Gold Lion at Cannes Lions.
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.
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.
Stella Artois | 2024
A campaign by Stella Artois and GUT Miami called "The Most Famous 6-Pack Model," which won a Gold Lion at Cannes Lions 2024.
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.
APPLE | Fuzzy Feelings | 2024
I was on the verge of tears for the whole four minutes. When stop-motion and live action melted together and George Harrison's "Isn't It a Pity" started playing, I was completely gone.
カップヌードル | ラクサ食べてよ | 2024
That buzz cut really caught me off guard. This commercial turns MAISONdes' song "Show Me Your Phone" into a parody, with an illustrated girl getting so hooked on laksa that she turns into a Cup Noodle-shaped buzz-cut man. The gap between that cute art style and what happens is intense!
Stella Artois | 2024
No face. No name. Just a tattooed hand. And yet, fans could tell instantly who it belonged to: David Beckham. Here's the clever twist Stella Artois pulled on celebrity advertising.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.