Best McCann Campaigns of All Time
McCann is the kind of agency that manages to be everywhere at once - from selling cat food in Paris to solving public health crises in Kabul with a handful of beads. They have a peculiar knack for making the sensible feel radical and the radical feel like common sense. It is high-stakes strategy wrapped in a very expensive coat. If you want to see how "Truth Well Told" actually translates into trophies, browse the work below.
45 campaigns
Lockheed Martin: Field Trip to Mars
Lockheed Martin transformed a school bus into an immersive Mars rover experience using transparent HD window displays and haptic feedback, allowing children to communally explore a mapped Martian landscape and inspiring the next generation of space explorers.
Ministry of Public Health, Afghanistan: Immunity Charm
The Immunity Charm campaign ingeniously transformed traditional Afghan lucky charm bracelets into vital immunization records, using colored beads as vaccine codes to overcome illiteracy and cultural biases, making vaccination a cherished tradition and improving child health.
Nestlé: Tummy Fish
Nestlé's 'Tummy Fish' campaign gamified water consumption for kids by creating a digital pet that thrived on water and became sad with sugary drinks, making healthy hydration fun and rewarding to combat poor health.
Mastercard: True Name
Mastercard introduced the True Name card, allowing transgender and non-binary individuals to use their chosen names on credit cards, directly combating daily discrimination and affirming their authentic identities in a world that often misgenders them.
March For Our Lives: Generation Lockdown
This campaign dramatically exposed the horrifying reality of active shooter drills in schools, presenting detailed, chilling survival tactics as a routine 'team building event' to shock adults into confronting the normalized trauma children face daily.
Mastercard: Roadside Market
Mastercard leveraged Waze technology to create pins for small farmers' roadside stands, directly connecting them with consumers and cutting out middlemen, thus providing farmers with better market access and consumers with fresh, local produce.
Animal Político: El examen
Animal Político transformed a harrowing investigative report into a cinematic short film about a top student's forced recruitment, using the 'perfect exam' as a chilling Trojan horse to expose how cartels steal Mexico's brightest futures.
L'Oréal: THE FINAL COPY OF ILON SPECHT
L'Oréal reclaimed its iconic slogan's feminist soul by producing a documentary about Ilon Specht, the copywriter who penned it in 1971 out of rage against male-dominated advertising, transforming a beauty cliché back into a powerful manifesto for self-worth.
Mastercard: From Fan to Featured
Mastercard transformed a traditional music video launch into a global participatory event by casting fans to replace Lady Gaga in a high-production reshoot, proving that Priceless experiences come from turning the audience into the stars of the show.
Xbox - The Everyday Tactician
Xbox launched a groundbreaking campaign by turning a Football Manager game player into a real football team's tactician, proving that gaming skills can translate into actual professional sports opportunities.
Mastercard - Where to Settle
Mastercard created a digital platform called "Where to Settle" that uses anonymized data to help Ukrainian refugees find the best smaller cities in Poland for housing and job opportunities. By leveraging their data responsibly, Mastercard helped refugees navigate their resettlement challenges while demonstrating their commitment to social impact.
Xbox: The Everyday Tactician
Xbox proved the realism of Football Manager 2024 by hiring a top gamer as a real-life tactician for Bromley FC, demonstrating that virtual management skills translate into professional sporting success and tangible results on the pitch.
L'Oréal - Worth It Resume
L'Oréal's "Worth It Resume" campaign empowered women to publicly share their professional failures on LinkedIn, transforming setbacks into strengths and challenging the societal pressure for perfection, thereby recontextualizing the brand's iconic "Because I'm Worth It" slogan for the modern workplace.
Mastercard: Room for Everyone - Where to Start
Mastercard launched "WhereToStart," a free digital tool leveraging anonymized spending data, traffic, and noise levels to help Polish and Ukrainian entrepreneurs find optimal locations for new businesses, fostering economic integration and positive sentiment amidst the refugee crisis.
LBCF: The Bread Exam
To bypass cultural taboos and censorship around women's bodies, the campaign used the traditional act of kneading bread as a medical metaphor, teaching life-saving self-examination gestures through a recipe video that could be shared freely in conservative societies.
Xbox: The Birth of Gaming Tourism
Xbox reframed high-fidelity video games as travel destinations by partnering with Rough Guides to create a legitimate travel book. By adopting the language of the tourism industry, they invited non-gamers to explore virtual worlds rather than just play them.
Microsoft: The Franchise Model
Xbox transformed the Design Lab from a customization tool into an entrepreneurial platform by allowing fans to claim, name, and sell their own controller designs for profit, turning passive consumers into a motivated, global sales force.
L'Oreal: The Non-Issue
L'Oreal and British Vogue launched a standalone magazine supplement where every contributor and subject was over 50, turning the "invisible" demographic into the sole focus to prove that age should be a non-issue in beauty.
Purina: Street-Vet
Purina transformed ordinary street poles into digital diagnostic labs that analyzed dog urine in real-time. By turning a daily walk into a health check, the brand provided immediate medical utility that bridged the gap between pet owners and professional care.
GSK: Breath of Life
GSK transformed smartphones into diagnostic tools by turning a clinical lung test into a traditional Chinese blowing-ink art experience on WeChat, gamifying COPD screening to overcome the stigma and dismissal of respiratory symptoms among China's aging population.
Microsoft: Changing the Game
Microsoft introduced the Xbox Adaptive Controller, empowering 33 million disabled gamers to play naturally and equally, fostering inclusion and demonstrating that everyone can participate in the joy of gaming, thus changing perceptions of ability in the gaming world.
IKEA: Thisables
IKEA created the "ThisAbles" campaign to design customized furniture attachments for people with disabilities, using 3D printing technology to make existing furniture more accessible and functional for people with different physical needs, thereby championing inclusivity and demonstrating that design can solve real-world challenges for the disabled community.
Paytm: Sweet Change
Paytm tackled the Indian habit of shopkeepers giving candy instead of loose change by creating branded 'Sweet Change' candies with redeemable digital wallet codes, turning a daily frustration into a seamless and rewarding mobile payment onboarding experience.
March For Our Lives: Price On Our Lives
By calculating the exact dollar value of a student's life based on NRA political donations, the campaign turned a complex political debate into a tangible, wearable price tag that exposed the literal cost of legislative inaction.
Nespresso: The Quest
Nespresso dramatized the search for the perfect cup by sending a medieval knight on a quest through modern New York, proving that the exceptional quality of Vertuo coffee is a reward worth defying space and time for.
Change the Ref - The Unfinished Votes
Change the Ref created a powerful campaign using AI to digitally resurrect Joaquin Oliver, a victim of gun violence, to encourage unregistered voters to participate in elections. By bringing back Joaquin as a digital persona, the campaign aimed to transform his unfinished life into a message about voting and gun safety.
Cigna: TV Doctors of America
Cigna recruited iconic TV doctors to humorously admit their medical incompetence, leveraging their massive cultural authority to persuade viewers that real-life preventive check-ups are the only way to actually save lives.
Verena International: Capture
Verena anthropomorphized the biological process of fat absorption by staging a surreal police checkpoint inside the body, using deadpan Thai humor to transform a dry scientific mechanism into a memorable, high-stakes drama about "arresting" grease before it reaches the belly.
UBREW: Responsibly - The Beer
UBREW named their low-alcohol beer 'Responsibly' to hijack the mandatory legal disclaimers in every competitor's advertisement, effectively turning the multi-million dollar budgets of global beer giants into a free, ubiquitous promotional campaign for their own craft brand.
SSGA: Fearless Girl
State Street Global Advisors placed a statue of a fearless girl directly facing the iconic Wall Street bull statue to symbolize women's strength and challenge gender inequality in the workplace. By creating a powerful visual metaphor on International Women's Day, the brand highlighted the importance of gender diversity and female leadership in a bold, memorable way.