Nikka's 'dear difference': blending retold as dots, no bottle and no drop
Dentsu Tokyo rebuilt Taketsuru Pure Malt's blend as a language of colliding dots - a whisky campaign with no bottle, no glass and not a drop of amber liquid.
Read the casecreatives.centerA CASESTUDIES.CHAT ARCHIVE
Ideas that make
you look twice.
Creative work with a story behind it. From the brief to the impact.
The full archive, in the appPublished cases
2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDValve's Portal turns one student mechanic, the portal gun, into a whole acclaimed game
Valve hires DigiPen students after a career-fair demo; their portal-gun mechanic becomes Portal, a puzzle game with no combat and a singing ending.
Read the casePlenty of Fish: one developer, a 10-hour week and $10M a year, sold for $575M
Markus Frind built a free dating site in 2003 to teach himself ASP.NET — then ran it from his apartment on autopilot until Match paid $575 million in cash.
Read the caseMeituan's 'i-people buy iPhones' films lift Apple sales 572% on the app
SG argued an introvert's 'i' belongs with iPhone's 'i': seven absurd shorts told i-people to buy Apple products on Meituan — 130M+ exposures in three days.
Read the caseBeyoncé drops a surprise album with no singles or promo — 828K sold in 3 days
Beyoncé releases a 14-song visual album on iTunes at midnight with zero warning — no singles, no promo — and fans sell it for her.
Read the caseUnipads grows crops with menstrual-blood compost to end a Gujarat kitchen taboo
A reusable-pad brand asks women to drop used pads in farm compost pits, then serves meals grown with the 'blood fertilizer' to disprove the taboo.
Read the caseHeineken and Bodega launch a no-apps 'Boring Phone' to save nights out — One Show Gold
A limited-edition dumb phone with only calls and texts, made with Bodega and HMD, turns Heineken's anti-scroll insight into a cultural object — 7B+ impressions.
Read the caseGoogle's Project Aristotle finds psychological safety, not star power, makes teams work
Google studies 180 teams to learn why some succeed; the answer is psychological safety — so it publishes a five-key guide any team can use.
Read the casemycar's 'Sunburnt Car' (2026): prosthetic-skin interior shows UV damage while driving
An Australian car chain reupholstered a car interior in hyper-real skin that visibly burns under UV — 65% of drivers skip sunscreen before driving.
Read the caseKinki University becomes Kindai in English — killing the joke, keeping the name
Laughs at overseas conferences pushed Kinki University to become Kindai University in English from 2016, while staying Kinki Daigaku in Japanese.
Read the caseThis Girl Can: Sport England films sweaty real women — 2.8M do more exercise
A 2015 government campaign filmed women sweating and jiggling to counter the fear of judgement; within a year 2.8M women did more exercise.
Read the caseBilibili and Shanghai Animation Film Studio's 'Yao-Chinese Folktales' hits 230M plays
For animation's centenary, Shanghai's legendary studio and Bilibili let ten directors remake 'tales of the strange' in eight styles — 230M views.
Read the caseWhite Ribbon reprints 500 real violence stories — 1% of a year's news — as a newspaper
Innocean republished 500 of the 48,000 news stories on men's violence against women into a 194-page newspaper sent to Australia's decision-makers.
Read the caseJourney strips multiplayer down to anonymity — strangers cooperate without names or words
Journey removes names, chat and lobbies — anonymous players who can only chirp end up helping each other, and the game becomes PSN's fastest seller.
Read the casePoetry me, please: a $3K poetry showcase side hustle brings in $148K a year
ESPN product manager Rashan Brown spent $3,000 on a bar-room poetry night in 2021; by 2024 Poetry me, please earned $148,000 without charging poets to perform.
Read the caseEnterogermina engineers a toast that lands butter-side up — El Ojo 2025 Grand Prix
A probiotic brand hired the physicist who proved toast falls butter-side down, then built one that defies it — and won El Ojo's Salud & Pharma Grand Prix.
Read the caseitch.io lets developers choose the store's cut — 0-100%, default 10%
The indie storefront applied pay-what-you-want to itself: sellers set the platform's share anywhere from 0-100%, and Creator Days pass 100% to creators.
Read the caseWhirlpool puts washing machines in schools and attendance climbs — Care Counts
Whirlpool installs washers and dryers in schools so kids can wash clothes, then tracks attendance — clean clothes beat incentives.
Read the caseNissan's Kicks Key: a zip-tie sneaker tag that unlocks the car — Loeries Bronze
For the GCC launch of the sneaker-inspired Nissan Kicks, Digitas turned the zip-tie sneaker tag into a working car key and gave just 50 to the first buyers.
Read the caseMicrosoft swaps the job interview for a weeks-long academy to hire autistic talent
Traditional interviews screen out autistic candidates, so Microsoft replaced them with a hands-on multi-week 'academy' that watches people actually work.
Read the case