After 28 title-less years, the country’s beer icon walked away from the Argentine national team. A smaller brand took its place and Argentina immediately won the Copa América, the Finalissima and the World Cup. In a country where fans credit lucky shirts and lucky bars, the new sponsor claimed the one position the old one never could.

A follower on Instagram dared Poland’s biggest pasta brand to make pasta shaped like tennis rackets. Hours later, production was on. Fans were dared back to name it while their national star played her way to the Wimbledon final. Basically, the comments section wrote the brand plan.

When restaurant sales dipped, this iconic Thai brand gave their beloved fish ball mascot a frown and served it without explanation. Customers came back not for a discount but to cheer her up.

Nobody logs into a government portal to vote on local budgets. But everyone already decides what to do with their money at an ATM. The global payment network added public funds polling to the menu. Priceless.

Colombians care more about telenovela characters than about their own insurance. Plot twist: the national insurance brand let them buy real policies on the characters, with real payouts when the story turned on them.

Most aid sends money. This one helped displaced Lebanese women by turning their family recipes into intellectual property they could sell to restaurants around the world. The women keep earning royalties even when the campaign ends.

On your phone at 2am? Perfect moment to offer a new mattress. While a late-night promotional message would normally feel out of place, the two-word text that usually means something else entirely won people over on Valentine’s Day.

Tourism advertising leans on what people say about a place. This one looks at what animals do instead. If they keep coming from all over the world, that tells you enough.

Most of road safety problems rely on people doing the right thing. This one shifts that responsibility literally into the brand. With a small bit of tech, the badge in front of the car is doing the heavy lifting.

40% of all soup is sold during cold and flu season, but nobody reaches for the soup aisle when they’re sick. This soup brand reimagined its signature chicken noodle flavour as a lozenge, jumped aisles, and sold out three times. Instant late-night TV coverage, no added water needed.

Celebrity integrations sell to fans. This one sold to haters. Haaland is one of football’s most polarising players, and he’s been playing Clash of Clans since he was ten. They built him into the game as a character protecting the village he’d spent a decade building. Millions of people wanted him to lose, and now they had a way to do it. Hatred as an acquisition strategy.

Brazil’s largest delivery platform processes billions of orders a year. Its restaurant partners, mostly family-run, keep closing because they can’t get pricing or stock right.

The data to fix that was already sitting inside the platform doing nothing so they repackaged it as operational guidance. The customers the platform needs alive got the tools to stay alive.

55,874 girls play football in Denmark. Most of them drop their dream in their teens partly because they can’t picture a future in it. Rather than telling them to stay, F.C. Copenhagen put them on the stadium walls next to the legends they want to become.

After every school shooting, politicians blame video games instead of passing laws. A gun safety nonprofit called that bluff: they built a survival game where the only way to stay alive is to collect five real pieces of pending legislation. The scapegoat became the messenger.

Every beverage brand fights for front-row fridge space. But in China’s sun-exposed corner shops, back-row beer runs 6.5°C cooler. They didn’t lobby or paid for prime real estate. They just put their beer where the behaviour already was. Temperature beat visibility.

I don’t usually post about award shows. The big ones don’t need my help, and most of them are designed to make money. Entry fees add up fast and smaller agencies rarely come out ahead.

The PHNX Awards are different. That’s why I’m making an exception.

Born during COVID as a goodwill gesture from AdForum toward the industry, PHNX runs on a model you don’t see elsewhere. Entry is free. You only pay if you get shortlisted. The jury isn’t a club of network creative directors. It’s hundreds of people across disciplines: creatives, strategists, journalists, brand managers, independents.

What I find most useful is the feedback. When jurors score your work unusually high or low, they have to explain why. Those comments come back to you. Win or lose, you learn something.

If you’re at a boutique agency, part of an independent team, or you just have work you believe in but no budget to gamble on a big show, this was built for you. Deadline is 23 March 2026. Worth a look.

PS1: This year they’ve introduced a WTF category. You know if you have something for it.

PS2: Full disclosure… I have no vested interest other than knowing the organisers and wishing them well.

Two brands whose entire identity is refusing to be serious teamed up on the one product category that’s always serious. Only 150 urns, but the playlist generator is open to anyone (as long as you live in the US).

The Weather Channel doesn’t cover Nicaragua’s Dry Corridor. Ten women-run weather stations, WhatsApp, and local radio now do. The most accurate forecast, as it happens, comes from whoever has the most to lose.

Online shooters have no pause button. Gamers love (or need) snacking while playing but if you eat, you die. Instead of interrupting gameplay with ads, Heinz mapped safe hiding spots inside Call of Duty where players could actually stop and eat. Missed opportunity for Kit-Kat. Oh, well.

The refurbished tech marketplace hijacked “Shot on iPhone’s” iconic format to show what happened to nature between model releases. And established “fast tech” as a thing in the process.