Cornetto’s ‘Unwrap It’ campaign reimagines ice cream wrappers as bodies of water.
It’s a truism of advertising: the simpler the better.
Many campaigns among this week’s Top 5 followed that rule, with impressive craft that helped their single-minded approaches breakthrough. This was true of an unsparing gun-violence PSA, a stark 9/11 anniversary campaign and, most of all, a beautifully pared-back outdoor campaign for ice cream.
See the full Top 5 below.
E.l.f. Cosmetics has been masterly with the collabs of late, and here’s the latest—a partnership with Tinder to help people feel more confident when they go on first dates. Key to e.l.f. partnerships like this is the relatively light lift in packaging existing products into new co-branded collections. But these two brands are also just fundamentally simpatico. And the very fun spot by Mischief doesn’t hurt, either.
Those who can barely wait for Oct. 31 will get a kick out of this Tourism Ireland spot, which revisits the island’s proto-Halloween traditions from two millennia ago, when the Samhain festivals marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. It’s smart for Ireland to embrace something on the calendar beyond St. Patrick’s Day, and this moody film goes a long way toward renewing the country’s ownership of the darker parts of its history.
We’ve seen scores of gun-violence PSAs over the years. This one, spearheaded by Smuggler, stands out for its simple, disturbing visuals and chilling voiceover. Gun control often feels like a lost cause. Perhaps appealing to hunters, and common sense, can make a difference.
The further we get from 9/11, the more important it becomes to educate and remember. This campaign does both. Replacing the typical celebrity photos in New York pizzerias with photos of 9/11 first responders, complete with stories about them, is both emotional and informative—a worthy remembrance of the past as well as a call to action for the future, as many first responders still need medical care today for health issues that began 23 years ago.
The simplest and most purely delightful campaign of the week came from Cornetto, the ice cream brand, which handcrafted a series of outdoor ads in Europe using ripped wrappers to represent oceans, lakes and pools. The campaign, which will soon expand globally, feels almost more like art than advertising—effortlessly nostalgic yet complete brand-centric at the same time.
The Cornetto ads use real ripped wrappers to beautiful effect.
