Teaser advertising is built on a simple but difficult principle: create enough curiosity that audiences seek out the resolution. The campaigns in this collection built genuine anticipation - not through vague mystery, but through precisely calibrated withholding of something that audiences genuinely wanted to know. Apple's pre-launch campaigns for the iPhone revealed almost nothing and created enormous anticipation. Theatrical release teasers have developed the form into a sophisticated creative discipline. And some brand campaigns have used the teaser format to generate earned media before a single product shot appeared.
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Starting in 1 minute
- Carina Güttler for 100 beste Plakate · 2025
Poster for a German theatre piece staged at a trotting-racetrack grandstand. The racehorse and ticking clock times turn the countdown-to-the-race into the show's own tense "one minute to start."
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Teaser
- Versace · 2016
Versace "Teaser". A Versace fashion teaser building anticipation for a collection.
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Vorfreude
- Deutsche Bahn · 2021
"Vorfreude" (Anticipation) for Deutsche Bahn: a woman blissfully lost in thought captures the happy anticipation of a journey - selling the train as part of the joy of getting there.
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Let's Be Together This Christmas
- airBaltic · DDB Latvia · 2018
airBaltic's 'Let's Be Together This Christmas': the melancholy of holiday distance - life takes people apart, literally - answered by the airline that closes the distance. The insight: the route network as the gift; Christmas advertising's warmth with a boarding pass attached.
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Eliminating stains
- ola · WAWA · 2015
Ad for OLA Oxipoder stain remover. The coffee visibly flying off the shirt under the spray demonstrates the promise directly - stains eliminated on contact.
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Advent Calendar - Christmas Campaign
- mathrubhumi · 2019
Mathrubhumi's Advent Calendar: a month-long Christmas gifting scheme rendered as an eight-ad print series, each of the group's media verticals hand-illustrated as a much-loved Christmas tree ornament, culminating in a layout hanging all eight together. The insight: a media group's breadth is dull as
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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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Exam
- Instant Kiwi · DDB New Zealand · 2019
The campaign dramatizes the irresistible urge to play Instant Kiwi by showing a student scratching a ticket in the most socially inappropriate place: a dead-silent university exam hall. It taps into the humor of high-pressure, silent environments where any noise is magnified, highlighting how the an
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Jagran Film Festival Promo 2016
- jagran film festival · 2016
Jagran Film Festival "Promo 2016". A festival promo celebrating cinema for the travelling film festival.
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Beautiful Chaos
- Google Pixel · Dark Horses · 2024
To find an authentic role within a major football tournament, this campaign moved the focus from the polished on-field action to the fans. The strategy was built on the insight that the true magic of the sport lives in the messy, passionate, and unpredictable fan experience, which the campaign title
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Smells Like Football
- Hisense · Fiasco · 2026
To connect with football fans beyond picture quality, this campaign tapped into the insight that the sport's passion is a full sensory experience where smells are powerfully evocative. The creative idea, "Smells Like Football," suggests that Hisense's immersive technology is so powerful it feels lik
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Zlatan is ready for the 2026 FIFA World Cup
- Fox Sports · Wieden+Kennedy · 2026
To generate early hype for its 2026 FIFA World Cup broadcast, Fox Sports leveraged the tension between Zlatan Ibrahimović's advanced age and his god-like public persona. The creative idea was to have Zlatan humorously announce his readiness for the 2026 tournament, an absurd proposition that is perf
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#ExpectMore $200 Million
- Samsung · 72andSunny · 2014
To steal market share from Apple, this campaign directly challenged the perception of the iPhone as the default premium smartphone. It was built on the insight that many consumers felt Apple's pace of innovation had slowed, leaving them wanting more. The creative idea, #ExpectMore, reframed the conv
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#ExpectMore Alien
- Samsung · leo burnett · 2014
Part of Samsung's Galaxy 11 saga, in which a team of the world's biggest footballers - Messi, Ronaldo and others - must win a match against an alien invasion to save the planet. The insight is that football is the one language that unites the whole planet, so the ultimate high-stakes fixture is not
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Dust & Water Resistant
- Samsung · leo burnett · 2014
Samsung needed to differentiate the Galaxy S5 in a saturated market where fragile smartphones left users in constant anxiety over accidental liquid and dust damage. Recognizing that durability is most valuable in messy, everyday domestic scenarios rather than extreme outdoor sports, the campaign ref
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Points of view
- The Guardian · Boase Massimi Pollitt · 1986
A skinhead sprints toward a well-dressed man. The first angle reads as a mugging. The second, closer, shows him grabbing the man violently. The wide shot reveals the truth: he is hauling him clear of a falling pallet of bricks. The insight is that the same event yields opposite meanings depending en
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Holidays Are Coming
- Coca-Cola Company · Wieden+Kennedy · 1995
Coca-Cola manufactured a Christmas ritual by branding the arrival of the season itself: illuminated red trucks rolling through the dark, and a jingle that says only 'Holidays are coming.' The insight is that Christmas advertising fights over identical emotional territory every year, so the brand tha
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Holidays Are Coming
- The Coca-Cola Company · Wieden+Kennedy · 1995
Illuminated red trucks roll through a snowy night to a jingle, and arrive - and that arrival, repeated every year, becomes the thing that starts Christmas. The insight is that seasons in culture do not begin on a date, they begin when a signal appears, and a brand can appoint itself that signal. The
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Pre-Joy
- Cadbury · fallon · 2015
This work evolved Cadbury's long-running 'Free The Joy' platform, built on the insight that the anticipation of a treat can be as pleasurable as the treat itself. The creative idea was to celebrate the small, personal rituals people perform in the moments just before eating a Cadbury chocolate, chri
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From lie to truth in few seconds
- Honda · Y&R, São Paulo, Brazil · 2016
Y&R's campaign for the Honda CB 1000R sells acceleration as a moment of reckoning. The insight: a bike this fast collapses the distance between claim and proof, so from lie to truth in a few seconds frames the throttle as the point where any doubt about its power is instantly, physically settled.
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Expresso 2020
- Expresso Newspaper · Moon · 2020
Expresso's 2020 campaign for the newspaper's role in a year that outran comprehension - positioning rigorous journalism as the way to make sense of a world changing weekly. A masthead brand ad: the product is not news but orientation.
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World Cup 1998 Brazil at the Airport
- Nike · wieden+kennedy · 1998
The Brazilian national team, stuck in an airport terminal, simply start playing - off pillars, past check-in desks, over luggage - with no stadium and no tournament anywhere in sight. The insight is that Brazilian football is understood worldwide as a way of playing rather than a record of results,
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FIFA World Cup 2026 - Let's Make It Iconic | Official Trailer
- BBC · bbc creative · 2026
The BBC's World Cup trailer puts fans and players on the same footing, cutting between them as a single crowd rather than performers and audience. The promise is that the iconic moments will happen live and in public, and that the BBC is where they land as they unfold.
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The One To Watch | Now Streaming | Max
- HBO Max · hbo max in-house · 2023
To solve the business challenge of rebranding HBO Max to Max while merging Discovery+ content, the campaign addresses the tension of household viewing fragmentation, where family members juggle multiple apps for prestige dramas and casual reality TV. The big idea, The One to Watch, positions the sim
Teaser campaigns fail when what they're withholding isn't actually interesting enough to justify the anticipation they've built. The reveal has to deliver what the teaser promised - or the audience feels manipulated. The campaigns in this collection worked because the setup was earned by the payoff. Understanding that relationship - between promise and delivery, between anticipation and resolution - is essential to making this format work.