Shock in advertising, like humour, is a means rather than an end. At its best - Benetton's AIDS awareness campaigns, Barnardo's disturbing child abuse imagery, the original Wonderbra billboard - it forces attention onto something that comfortable advertising would look away from. The campaigns in this collection used shock as a creative strategy, not a substitution for one. They provoked because the provocation was the argument. What they have in common is courage: the willingness to make work that would not please everyone, because pleasing everyone was not the brief.
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The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion
- Penguin Books Ltd · David Pearson · 2009
Cover for Schopenhauer's The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion. The suffering devotional figure, presented coolly with the philosopher's dismissive quote, sets faith itself under critical, ironic scrutiny.
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Do Me
- Tin House Books · Jason Ramirez · 2010
Cover for Tin House's Do Me anthology of erotica. The come-hither sticker on an inviting open book plays the double meaning - literature you take to bed, one night at a time.
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The Sellout
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux · Rodrigo Corral · 2015
Cover for Paul Beatty's The Sellout. Wallpapering the design with a racist lawn ornament confronts the reader with the loaded iconography the Booker-winning satire skewers.
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Fuck You
- 2023
A single-gesture provocation reduced to its barest icon - one line-drawn hand delivering the message with no decoration. Confrontation as minimalism.
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Ruin Your Resolutions
- BURGER KING Belgium · Happiness Brussels · 2022
About twenty minutes into the new year, Burger King Belgium was already flyposting streets where people were still out. The posters show young people eating a Whopper 12 or 23 minutes after midnight, on the observation that resolutions survive right up until the brain suggests otherwise.
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SORRY MY FRIEND
- BURGER KING® France · Buzzman · 2026
Burger King France ran the Paris metro with an apology to actual friends, because Baby Burgers turn up more reliably than they do. Boxes of 3 or 9 cover the binge-watch, the big match, the energy slump and the end of the month, so the product is cast as the more dependable relationship.
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Wars
- Amnistia Internacional · Wild Fi Santiago, Chile · 2026
The campaign leans on the double meaning of the word. On one side are the armed conflicts where children and adolescents are forcibly recruited; on the other are the wars of an actual childhood, pillow fights, tickle fights, water battles. Setting them in the same frame is what makes the real one le
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Teaser
- Versace · 2016
Versace "Teaser". A Versace fashion teaser building anticipation for a collection.
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We've Tried €verything
- Wallonie Securite routiere · Air Brussels · 2022
Wallonie Securite Routiere "We've Tried Everything". A road-safety spot making an urgent appeal for safer driving.
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A Call For Dialogue
- Lebanese Ministry of Telecommunications · TBWA\RAAD · 2024
With Lebanon's presidency vacant for months, politicians excuse their inaction by claiming they lack each other's phone numbers. On World Conversation Day, A Call for Dialogue calls the bluff, printing those politicians' actual numbers on billboards and tagging them on social. The insight: turn an a
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The Killer Smile
- Kintab · BBDO Guerrero
Kintab's 'The Killer Smile': a dolphin, a whale and a polar bear sculpted from toothpaste, dying on a toothbrush - the daily oral-care routine rendered as the marine-life killer it becomes when microplastic-laden paste washes to sea. The insight: the murder weapon is in everyone's bathroom; making t
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Beauty Tips by Reshma: How to get perfect red lips
- make love not scars · ogilvy & mather · 2016
'Make Acid Unavailable to the Common Man': the after-effects of acid attacks - peeled skin, lost sight, a lifetime of visible pain - as the case for restricting over-the-counter acid sales. The insight: the weapon is a household purchase; the campaign attacks availability, the one variable regulatio
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Made You Look, You Dirty Chook
- bishopp · Rumble Creative & Media · 2015
Bishopp, one of Australia's largest regional outdoor media owners, rebranded around the country saying made you look, dirty chook. The insight: an outdoor media company's whole product is making people look, so it built a cast of literal dirty chooks, shifty, roguish cartoon chickens, to prove its o
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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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Cancer now comes in flavours.
- Canadian Cancer Society · Rethink, Toronto, Canada · 2015
The Canadian Cancer Society attacks flavoured tobacco products designed to appeal to young people. The insight: sweet, candy-like flavours disguise what the product actually delivers, so cancer now comes in flavours strips away the marketing gloss and names the real outcome, exposing how flavouring
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Don't Play With Fire
- Burger King · Buzzman Paris · 2019
When McDonald's Belgium put a taunting panel beside Burger King's new Brussels restaurant, BK fired back on its own storefront. The insight: BK's whole identity is flame-grilling, a fight McDonald's can't win, so why try to roast when you can't even flame grill turns the rivalry's own language again
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Army "Don't become a better you"
- Army · 2016
The British Army's recruitment campaign runs on reverse psychology, with lines like don't join the Army and don't become a better you. The insight: telling a defiant Generation Z audience not to do something provokes the exact curiosity a hard sell would kill, so the negative command dares potential
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Can I help?
- ikea · We Are Social Milan · 2021
For International Women's Day, IKEA and We Are Social Milan wrote an open letter to the Treccani dictionary about a phrase too polite to be condemned: Can I help? The insight: the most durable inequality hides in language that sounds generous, because offering to help with housework quietly frames i
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Recycle, before others have to do it for you
- Greenpeace · Pedro Juan y Diego · 2021
Greenpeace's recycling campaign reframes inaction as a burden passed on. The insight: waste you don't deal with doesn't disappear, it becomes someone else's, or nature's, problem, so recycle before others have to do it for you turns a chore into a matter of not offloading your mess onto the world.
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Sex toys
- innocence in danger · Glow · 2016
Innocence in Danger confronts the abuse of children with a deliberately jarring title. The insight: predators reduce children to objects for their own gratification, so naming that reality as bluntly as Sex toys refuses the euphemism the subject is usually wrapped in, forcing the viewer to face how
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You need balls
- Loto Libanais · Impact BBDO Dubai · 2016
Impact BBDO's campaign for the Lebanese lottery runs on a double meaning. The insight: winning takes both the physical lottery balls and the nerve to play, so you need balls turns the draw's own equipment into a cheeky dare, framing buying a ticket as an act of guts.
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Your Fun Hurts Animals
- PETA · Ogilvy, Tegucigalpa, Honduras · 2021
PETA and Ogilvy Honduras confront circuses that still force animals to perform despite public condemnation. The insight: the audience's delight and the animal's suffering are two sides of the same act, so contrasting the circus's bright pageantry with the misery behind it makes clear that your fun h
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Make a child cry.
- Doctors of the World · DDB Paris · 2015
DDB Paris's campaign for Doctors of the World reframes a child's distress at the doctor as a privilege. The insight: kids cry at instruments and medicine, but 4 million under-fives die each year from preventable disease because they never reach a doctor at all, so make a child cry recasts that cry a
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Littering says a lot about you
- live green toronto · 2017
Live Green Toronto's anti-littering campaign makes the act a statement about the person doing it. The insight: people don't think of dropping litter as revealing anything about themselves, so littering says a lot about you reframes a careless habit as a public display of character, making the indivi
Shock advertising has a poor reputation largely because most of it is just shocking - lacking the creative intelligence to convert the provocation into an idea. The campaigns worth studying are the ones where the shocking element was also the most precise articulation of the message. Studied carefully, they reveal something important: that the most powerful advertising doesn't just reach the audience, it unsettles them.