Animation in advertising opens up possibilities that live action can't reach - metaphors made literal, worlds that don't follow physical rules, emotional stories told in visual languages that bypass cynicism. John Lewis's 'The Bear and the Hare' brought a lost friend home for Christmas through hand-drawn illustration. Chipotle's 'Back to the Start' made an argument for sustainable farming through a stop-motion scarecrow. The best animated advertising understands that the choice of animation style is itself a creative statement.
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Olly Brown, God of Hamsters
- Scholastic · Jack Noel · 2024
Cover for Bethany Walker's Olly Brown, God of Hamsters. The boy engulfed by his multiplying pets sets up the comic premise instantly - one kid hilariously in over his head with hamsters.
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How to Love
- Walker Books · Ben Norland · 2024
Cover for Alex Norris's How to Love. The soft blobby character cradled in hearts gives the guide a gentle, inclusive, non-threatening face - feelings made friendly and approachable.
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Holey Moley
- Little Tiger Picture Books · Elle Boultwood · 2024
Cover for the picture book Holey Moley. The grinning mole emerging from its hole and the title pun set an instantly fun, warm tone for young readers.
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Bike Ride
- Clif Bar · Callen · 2019
Directed by Andreas Nilsson for the Make It Good campaign, the film brings Clif Bar's logo climber to life as a cheerful cyclist who pedals through handmade forests and fields to the brand's own factory, doing good along the way. The craft-built miniature world dramatises Clif's mission-driven, sust
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The First Light
- Riot Games · Riot Games (in-house) · 2020
Riot Games launched its tactical shooter, Valorant, into a competitive market dominated by legacy titles by establishing a distinct narrative identity that merged precise gunplay with character-driven lore. Knowing that competitive gamers crave both mechanical precision and a high-stakes world to in
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Stitches
- SRMG · 2021
SRMG "Stitches". A media-group spot framing storytelling that stitches ideas and people together.
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Women's Equality Day
- HBO · Wieden+Kennedy, New York, USA · 2019
For Women's Equality Day - the 99th anniversary of US suffrage - HBO commissioned paintings of four women from its own shows, each shining a light on the ongoing fight for equal pay, representation and agency. The insight: a network's characters are cultural shorthand; borrowing their authority move
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Plank
- good ads matter selects · aardman animations · 1993
Good Ads Matter selects "Plank". An Aardman-animated short, selected for its craft, using charm to carry a social message.
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Jarlsberg Compromise
- jarlsberg · 2015
Jarlsberg "Jarlsberg Compromise". A cheese spot using a light "compromise" gag to celebrate Jarlsberg.
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Evil Blood
- trombosestichting · kesselskramer · 2021
The campaign reframes the life-threatening, invisible danger of thrombosis by packaging its symptoms and warning signs into an actual, published thriller novel titled Kwaad Bloed (Evil Blood). It taps into the insight that while people routinely ignore dry medical brochures, they are highly engaged
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Let’s talk about profitability
- Clockify · CAKE.com Creative HUB · 2026
Most small businesses cannot say with confidence whether they are actually profitable. Clockify builds the campaign on that uncertainty, showing costs, hours worked and budget estimates cross-referenced in one place and in real time, so the answer stops being a guess.
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Inner Workings
- Disney · Walt Disney Animation Studios · 2016
An animated short that literalises the tug-of-war inside one man between his cautious Brain, obsessed with getting to work safely and on time, and his impulsive Heart, which keeps steering him toward small joys - a swim, an ice cream, a stranger's smile. The insight is that a life run entirely by th
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The Background Catalog
- Easy
To drive e-commerce sales during pandemic lockdowns when physical stores were closed, home improvement retailer Easy tapped into the sudden rise of remote video conferencing. Recognizing that workers were self-conscious about their messy home environments on daily video calls, the brand created a se
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Stay Home Miles Exchange
- Thai Airways · Wunderman Thompson Bangkok · 2020
With travel halted during the pandemic, Thai Airways needed to keep its loyalty program relevant when air miles had become useless. The insight was that people felt both frustrated by the lockdown but also a sense of civic duty for staying home. The 'Stay Home Miles Exchange' idea transformed this d
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Data in Dollars
- Xfinity Mobile · goodby silverstein & partners · 2022
This campaign tackles consumer overspending on mobile data by making its cost tangible. The strategy is built on the insight that people don't think about data in monetary terms, leading to waste. The creative idea, 'Data in Dollars,' visualizes data as actual currency, reframing the value conversat
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SOS POS
- BCP · wunderman thompson peru · 2026
With over 4,000 phones stolen daily in Peru and thieves draining victims' banking apps, BCP turned the country's 17,500-plus shop payment terminals into an emergency account-freeze network: a robbery victim walks into any nearby store, enters their ID and PIN on the POS, and blocks their accounts in
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Copycats Welcome
- Clash Royale · wieden+kennedy · 2026
Clash Royale has spawned countless clone games copying its name, characters and gameplay, so rather than sue, it invited players of those knockoffs to convert their progress into rewards inside the real game - a film pulls original characters through a portal into fake Clash Royale worlds where they
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The KitKat Heist
- KitKat · VML · 2026
A week before Easter, 12 tonnes of KitKat - 413,793 bars - were genuinely stolen in transit between Italy and Poland. Instead of burying the loss, KitKat announced it on its own channels and turned it into a public whodunnit, launching a Stolen KitKat Tracker that invited the public to check batch c
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Paid Sick Leave For Cows
- LLLLITL · Aardman Animations · 2026
When a dairy cow is treated with antibiotics its milk is unsellable during a 3-5 day withdrawal period, and in Kenya that lost income pushes farmers to sell the treated milk anyway - a public-health crisis hiding inside a livelihood problem. Too Good and The Partnership Agency removed the penalty: a
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Circle of Life
- Disney · walt disney pictures · 1994
To generate anticipation for an original story not based on a familiar fairy tale, Disney bypassed traditional movie trailers and released the film's uninterrupted four-minute opening sequence as the theatrical teaser. This strategic move recognized that the sequence's combination of Zulu chanting,
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Angry Birds
- Google Chrome · 2011
To solve the strategic problem of demonstrating its technical superiority over competitors, Google Chrome tapped into the cultural phenomenon of native mobile gaming. The core insight was that people saw rich, fluid games like Angry Birds as an experience only possible on a phone, not in a web brows
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Coffee
- Google Chrome · BBH London · 2010
How do you dramatise milliseconds? Race the browser against things that are absurdly, physically fast: a potato gun, lightning, sound waves - page loads captured on high-speed cameras against real projectiles (the potato-gun setup took 51 takes). BBH New York and Google Creative Lab turned a benchma
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Foam City
- Sony · fallon london · 2007
Following the iconic 'Balls' and 'Paint' spots, 'Foam City' was the next chapter in Fallon's 'Colour Like No Other' platform for Sony Bravia. The campaign's strategy was to demonstrate the TV's spectacular, immersive colour by creating real-world, in-camera marvels, deliberately avoiding CGI. The cr
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Mr. W
- Gaioum
To overcome public indifference and local resistance toward wind turbines, this campaign reframes wind from an annoying daily nuisance into a misunderstood, untapped resource. The film personifies wind as Mr. W, a lonely, clumsy giant whose natural actions—like blowing off hats and ruining umbrellas
Animation is a medium that invites viewers to lower their defences. Something about the drawn or crafted image signals 'this is not the real world' - and that permission allows advertising to be more emotional, more metaphorical, and more honest than it might otherwise be. The campaigns in this collection earned that permission by doing something genuinely creative with the freedom it offered.