User-generated content campaigns represent a specific creative bet: that the audience's creativity, authenticity, and investment in a brand can produce advertising that is more compelling than anything a professional creative team could make. The Crash the Super Bowl contest for Doritos produced some of the most watched Super Bowl spots of the 2000s. Burberry's Art of the Trench turned customer photography into brand content. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge generated more coverage than any planned advertising campaign could have bought. These campaigns trusted their audiences and were rewarded for it.
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Hungerflix
- HungerStation · VML Dubai · 2020
Movie nights spark delivery cravings - so HungerStation let the movies set the menu. HungerFlix serves exactly what's on screen: the dish in the film, orderable to your sofa, in a kingdom where 24 million people stream. The insight: the appetite already exists at scale and has a timestamp; the platf
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The Social Feed
- HungerStation · VML Dubai · 2023
Saudis see 135 food posts a day yet order the same pizza, burger, shawarma - so HungerStation turned social media into the world's largest menu. DM any food post to its AI chatbot and it identifies the dish and finds the nearest restaurant serving it. The insight: the craving gap is an interface pro
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Create your adicolor
- adidas · TBWA\Barcelona · 2015
Ad for adidas adicolor. Dipping the shoe fully in one colour dramatises the campaign's promise - a blank canvas sneaker for wearers to drench in whatever colour they choose.
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People Are the Best
- Reddit · Mischief · 2022
To launch its first major US brand campaign, Reddit needed to counter the perception of the internet as a negative space. The campaign reframes the cynical belief that "people are the worst" with the declaration that on Reddit, "People Are the Best." The execution is built on surfacing real, brillia
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Code
- Pepsi · Sancho BBDO · 2012
With no media budget, Pepsi Colombia released a snippet of HTML and gave away drinks to anyone who used it - and people pasted the brand's message into major websites all over the internet themselves. The insight is that the web is editable by whoever is willing to paste code into it, and a fanbase
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Treecording
- Coca-Cola · AKQA Italy · 2023
Scan the bottle and your voice is turned, in real time, into a unique 3D Christmas tree in augmented reality - the shape of the tree generated from the waveform of what you said - and sent as a message. The insight is that the Christmas message people want to send is not text, it is a voice, and a v
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Your Bites, Your Rights
- Pepsi · Ampfy · 2025
In a Rio-style bar in São Paulo, Pepsi swapped the printed menu for a tablet that let diners invent their own dishes by voice: they described a combination, an AI generated an image of it, and the kitchen was challenged to actually cook it. The insight is that the fun of eating out is the wanting -
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The Epic Build
- Clash of Clans · Accademia Delle Arti e Nuove Tecnologie · 2024
The strategy reframes a point of player friction—the long wait for in-game constructions—as a source of entertainment. Tapping into the insight that players fill downtime with streaming services, the campaign treated a long build not as a pause, but as a production. The creative idea, "The Epic Buil
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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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Build Your Own Super Bowl Commercial
- Uber Eats · internal creative team · 2026
Uber Eats shot far more Super Bowl footage than it aired - 36-plus hours of unused scenes and dozens of celebrity cameos - then opened the offcuts inside its own app, letting users assemble their own version of the commercial from the parts, yielding over a thousand possible cuts. The insight is tha
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Lucky Fan Index
- Wisła Kraków Football Club · Rio Creativo · 2026
Two hundred match metrics were correlated against the attendance records of 250,000 supporters to calculate, per fan, how lucky they personally are for the club - and fans with a poor index were offered ways to improve it, starting with buying a scarf. The insight is that every football fan already
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Dear Sophie
- Google Chrome · BBH New York / Google Creative Lab · 2011
A father chronicles his daughter's life by emailing an address she cannot yet read - photos, videos, notes - assembling a childhood inside a Gmail account she will one day open. The insight is that Google's products quietly accumulate the most precious archive a family owns, and the value is not the
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Draw Ketchup
- Heinz · rethink · 2021
Heinz asked people around the world to draw ketchup, and almost everyone drew a Heinz bottle - the label, the neck, the shape - without being asked to. Those drawings became the ads. The insight is that the brand had become the generic mental image of the product itself, the strongest position in ma
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Twitter turns to users of the platform to inspire "the perfect Christmas ad"
- Twitter · David Miami · 2021
In 2020 a Twitter user posted the Christmas advert he had written and illustrated aged seven - a surreal story about two snowflakes called James and Jack who bounce off an octopus into a snow spray factory - and tagged John Lewis, suggesting they use it. John Lewis didn't. Twitter did, animating it
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Where I’m From
- Adobe · 2021
Eight Asian and Pacific Islander artists take the question every one of them has been asked - where are you from? - and answer it on their own terms, laying claim to the mix of places and inheritances that actually feeds their work. The insight is that the question is never really about geography; i
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Search it, learn it. | Do it with TikTok
- TikTok · unknown · 2022
A daughter helps her father settle into a new home, and every problem - the stained carpet, hanging the photos straight - gets solved by looking it up on TikTok, with the hacks then thrown open to the audience under #DoItWithTikTok. The insight is that people had quietly started using TikTok as a se
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#CheesePullChallenge
- kraft singles · Chicago Portfolio School · 2021
A student campaign for Kraft Singles turns melted cheese into a spectator sport. The insight: the satisfying stretch of a cheese pull is inherently shareable and competitive, so #CheesePullChallenge, how far will it go, invites people to test and post their own longest pull, making the product's mel
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Name This Oreo
- Oreo · The Martin Agency · 2013
The theory that the name OREO is built from the shape of the cookie - two Os with a RE of cream between them - was turned into an audio game: say the right combination of Os and REs aloud into your phone, against a timer, to unlock a reward. The insight is that a piece of fan folklore about the bran
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Redditor Edit
- Skoda · Fallon London · 2011
A Redditor joked that Skoda should build a version of the Octavia specced by the subreddit - so Skoda did, letting the community configure the car, and launched it as the Redditor Edit. The insight is that enthusiast communities have been designing cars in comment threads for years and have never on
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Draw Ketchup
- Kraft Heinz · rethink · 2021
Heinz asked people around the world to draw ketchup, and almost everyone drew a Heinz bottle - the label, the neck, the shape - without being asked to. Those drawings became the ads. The insight is that the brand had become the generic mental image of the product itself, the strongest position in ma
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Verified
- Vaseline · Edelman · 2021
Vaseline's own scientists took thousands of viral TikTok hacks about the product into a real laboratory and formally verified or debunked them - awarding a Vaseline Verified badge to the ones that worked and warning against the ones that were dangerous. The insight is that the brand had been reinven
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The Social Feed
- Hunger Station · VML Dubai · 2025
HungerStation let users direct-message any food photo they saw anywhere on social media, and its AI would identify the dish - across languages, with no caption - find it at a nearby restaurant and order it. The insight is that people scroll endlessly through beautiful food and then order the same pi
UGC campaigns are most effective when the brand creates a strong enough creative framework that the audience's contributions are coherent and on-brand, while being genuinely open enough that the contributions feel authentic rather than staged. Finding that balance - between structure and freedom - is the primary creative challenge in UGC work. The campaigns in this collection found it.