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.
56 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.
Hospice NZ: Dying Reviews
Hospice NZ turned the dying experience into a public review system, evaluating businesses on their compassion. By quantifying the systemic failures in how society treats the terminally ill, they forced corporations to confront their lack of dignity and design for the end of life.
Club Deportivo Municipal: The Thousand Sponsors of Muni
To save a relegated football club, the team turned its jersey into a grid of 1,000 micro-spaces for local fan-owned businesses. This collective sponsorship model provided essential funding while turning small shops into official, verified partners of the club.
Meadow Fresh: Fantasy Herd
Meadow Fresh gamified the dairy industry by turning real-time agricultural data from 500 cows into a fantasy sports league, transforming mundane farming metrics into an engaging, competitive experience that connected consumers directly to the source of their dairy.
Instacart: For Papa!
Instacart dramatized the absurdity of grocery shopping by framing the selection of banana ripeness as a high-stakes, chaotic variety show performance, highlighting the precision of their Preference Picker feature through comedic, over-the-top brotherly rivalry.
Xbox: Missing Managers
Xbox and Sky Sports transformed the virtual tactical skills of female gamers into real-world coaching careers, using Football Manager 26 to bridge the gender gap in professional football management by providing a tangible pathway for underrepresented talent.
IKEA: IKEA Preowned
IKEA launched 'Preowned,' a commission-free peer-to-peer marketplace, and turned its own advertising channels into classified ads for customers' used furniture, proving product durability and helping the brand achieve its 100% circularity goal.
Mastercard: Abracadabra: From Fan To Featured
Mastercard transformed a viral TikTok dance trend into a professional music video production, allowing die-hard fans to perform alongside Lady Gaga. This bridged the gap between passive consumption and active participation, turning fans into the stars of the brand's narrative.
Kids Help Phone: Defining Help
The campaign visualizes the crushing, surreal weight of youth mental health struggles through immersive metaphors, positioning the Kids Help Phone app as the essential, glowing lifeline that breaks the isolation and brings young people back to reality.
Kotex: Own Your Flow
Kotex reframed menstruation from a source of anxiety into a symbol of power by using a cinematic tennis metaphor, showing that when women trust their products, they can overcome societal stigma and rule their own worlds.
Wikifarmer: The Wedding Rice
Wikifarmer transformed non-edible, low-quality rice grains into a dedicated product for the Greek wedding tradition. By repurposing agricultural waste into a ceremonial necessity, the brand reduced food waste while creating a new, sustainable revenue stream for local farmers.
Prudential: The Beta Baby Bonus
Prudential hijacked the arrival of "Generation Beta" by offering a $150 retirement starter for babies born on New Year's Day, proving that with increased longevity, it is never too early to start protecting your life's work.
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.
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 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.
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.