Retail advertising is typically the most tactical form of advertising - this week's offer, this season's range, this sale ends Sunday. The campaigns in this collection represent the exceptions: retailers that used advertising to build something more durable than a transaction. John Lewis turned annual Christmas campaigns into cultural events. Harvey Nichols 'Sorry I Spent It on Myself' turned the Christmas gifting trope on its head. Target built a brand platform on the democratisation of style. These are retailers that understood the difference between advertising and brand building.
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AGM
- Bauhaus
A film for the DIY megastore Bauhaus: a dramatic overhead view down a vast aisle conveys the sheer scale and range on offer - everything a project could need, seen from above.
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Reese's Puffs - Prom Dress
- General Mills
General Mills "Reese's Puffs - Prom Dress". A bold youth-culture spot styling the cereal around a playful prom-dress moment.
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Dreamland (2021)
- Dreamland
A film for the toy store Dreamland: children absorbed in drawing and making at home celebrate imaginative play - the retailer as a gateway to childhood creativity.
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Superstar 82'
- Asphaltgold · STORIES2TELL · 2025
A collaboration between German sneaker retailer Asphaltgold and adidas Originals to relaunch the Superstar 82, developed with Austrian rapper Jugo Ürdens under the motto 'moving in contrasts'. The film treats the tracksuit-and-Superstar uniform as a cultural badge, staging it in a temple-like wardro
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Some Gifts You Just Can’t Buy
- Toys R Us · 2019
Moody night interior: a young boy sleeps in a striped red-green-and-white knit jumper, tucked against white bedding, his head near an ornate carved wooden bedstead. In the foreground a bedside table holds round wire-rimmed glasses; behind, a gauzy curtain glows with soft out-of-focus warm bokeh ligh
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Xfinity Mobile
- Apple · Goodby, Silverstein & Partners · 2019
Warm-lit boutique interior with shallow depth of field: a rack of neutral-toned knitwear and shirts (greys, cream, pale blue) hangs above a polished wood partition, while a round wooden stool in the foreground displays a burgundy suede ankle boot beside a white sneaker. Background shelving and a gla
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Weekend, Beef
- Meny · Kitchen · 2021
Handheld interior of a supermarket butcher counter: a gloved arm reaches across a glass-fronted chilled display packed with raw cuts - rack of lamb, bacon-wrapped parcels, tomato-topped rolls, marbled steaks and cured meats on dark trays. Warm tungsten light over green-tiled walls, staff in white sh
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Father’s Day
- CentrePoint · 2021
A Father's Day film for CentrePoint: a hand tucking a "Happy Father's Day" card onto a wrapped gift centres the thoughtful gesture - the retailer as the place to find the right present for dad.
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Petvertising
- Deliveroo · TBWA\RAAD · 2024
Deliveroo reaches pet owners by advertising to their pets: billboards across Dubai's pet-friendly parks pitched at dog height, cat level and bird-high, each fitted with motion and sound sensors that play animal-specific noises. The insight: to reach the human, delight the companion, and let the pet
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Black Friday Escape
- Etihad Airways · Impact BBDO · 2023
On Black Friday, an airline told people to escape the maddening over-consumption of the year's biggest shopping week - experiences over things, a flight instead of a haul. It broke the airline's booking records and delivered its most profitable year. The insight: counter-programme the sale; when eve
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Flipkart Ugadi Campaign Taps Ugadi vs Yugadi Debate
- flipkart · 22feet Tribal Worldwide · 2026
Flipkart's Ugadi campaign by 22feet Tribal: built entirely on the Ugadi-versus-Yugadi pronunciation debate across Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka - film, microsite and social riding one hyperlocal detail. The insight: nothing signals 'we know you' like taking sides in an argument only locals
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Making Home Count
- IKEA · TBWA · 2020
IKEA's 'Making Home Count' by TBWA\Singapore: a thank-you to everyone fighting the pandemic by staying home, cut entirely from footage the creatives shot inside their own lockdown flats. The insight: the brand of the home honours the home's new job - and the production constraint is the proof of sin
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Steps
- ikea · mother london · 2019
To launch its sustainable Greenwich store, IKEA asked customers to arrive the greenest way possible, on foot. The insight: a long walk feels daunting as a distance but manageable as a countdown, so 80 posters across South East London each displayed the exact number of steps remaining to the store, t
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Pee Ad
- IKEA · Åkestam Holst · 2018
IKEA Sweden ran a magazine ad women could urinate on like a pregnancy test. The insight: the moment a woman learns she's expecting is exactly the moment a crib becomes relevant, so if the embedded tech detects pregnancy the ad reveals a discounted price on a baby crib, turning the ad itself into the
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Get the Real One
- Musimundo · Young & Rubicam (Y&R), Buenos Aires, Argentina · 2017
Musimundo set out to redirect price-sensitive consumers away from cheap knock-off or counterfeit audio products toward authentic merchandise. The campaign taps into the truth that while people often settle for low-budget imitations due to cost—much like hiring a cheap cover band instead of the actua
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Harvey Nichols Influenced by None ad campaign
- Harvey Nichols · McCann · 2016
FP7/McCann's campaign for Harvey Nichols sells fashion as pure individuality. The insight: a luxury shopper wants to be seen as an original, not a follower, so surreal, fantastical imagery against clean backdrops casts the Harvey Nichols customer as influenced by none, dressing for themselves rather
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LIKEA
- ikea · Ogilvy · 2025
IKEA's LIKEA campaign builds on everyday idioms that already colour how people talk about home. The insight: familiar phrases like home sweet home carry ready-made feeling, so pairing them with IKEA products, and folding the brand name into the word LIKEA, positions IKEA as the bridge between ordina
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Tomorrow starts tonight
- IKEA · Mother · 2020
To position its bedding range as an essential wellness tool, IKEA sought to shift consumer perception of sleep from a passive necessity to an active health benefit. The campaign targets the cultural paradox where people spend heavily on expensive wellness supplements, energy drinks, and night creams
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The Fearniture Collection
- IKEA · DDB · 2020
Three IKEA products - a stool, a desk chair, a clothes rack - lit so precisely that their shadows on the wall become a monster, a ghost and a spider. Nothing is added; only the lamp moves. The insight is that a locked-down Italian Halloween had to happen indoors, among the furniture people already o
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Coming soon to Egypt
- IKEA · FP7 · 2013
Egypt's monuments redrawn as IKEA assembly instructions: the Sphinx, Tutankhamun's throne and the Qasr El Nil lion exploded into numbered flat-pack parts, step by step, ending "coming soon to Egypt". The insight is that a launch campaign's only job is to make the newcomer feel local, and nothing say
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IKEA Find (X)
- IKEA · Ogilvy Cairo · 2022
To boost back-to-school sales, IKEA Egypt set out to position its furniture as the ultimate solution for creating productive home study environments. The campaign taps into the cultural tension of back-to-school anxiety, where complex homework equations symbolize the overwhelming stress faced by bot
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Take Scare!
- IKEA · Tabasco · 2023
IKEA Halloween ad. Lighting the tote's compartments into a grinning pumpkin face turns an everyday bag into seasonal fun - a cheeky "take scare" spin on "take care."
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Save the world, sleep more
- IKEA · Sancho BBDO · 2024
A campaign arguing that the most useful environmental act available to you is to go back to bed: every hour asleep is an hour not consuming, not driving, not burning anything - so more sleep gives the planet a break. The insight is that environmental messaging is uniformly a demand for effort, and t
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What Words Can’t Say
- Kay Jewelers · Energy BBDO · 2021
Energy BBDO modernized Kay Jewelers' traditional romantic positioning by framing jewelry as a medium for expressing complex, deep-seated emotions. The strategy taps into the insight that in real relationships, the most profound feelings of gratitude, vulnerability, and support—especially after weath
The most valuable lesson in retail advertising is what happens when brands invest in brand equity rather than just promotional messages. The short-term ROI of a promotional campaign is immediate and measurable. The long-term value of brand equity is harder to quantify but ultimately more significant - it's the reason some retailers can charge more for the same products and still win. John Lewis's premium over its competitors is partly a product of its advertising.