Depression Stick fake vape brand shows vaping's mental-health toll — Grand Effie US 2023
A fake vape brand selling 'Citrus Sadness' showed teens vaping amplifies anxiety — the campaign was linked to 1.3M fewer young people vaping.
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2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDKakao turns chat emoticons into Korea's top character brand and a 1,000-person queue
KakaoTalk stickers with hidden quirks — a radish in a bunny suit — became Kakao Friends, a retail and licensing brand that did 70.5 billion won in 2016.
Read the caseVietnam's Health Ministry turns 'Ghen' into Ghen Cô Vy — a viral handwashing dance
Vietnam's health ministry reworked a 2017 pop duet into 'Ghen Cô Vy' — a handwashing anthem whose 15-minute dance became a global TikTok challenge.
Read the caseBTS's Love Yourself Album Becomes UNICEF Anti-Violence Campaign, Raising 4.5 Billion KRW
BTS and Big Hit turned 'Love Yourself First' into UNICEF #ENDviolence campaign, raising funds and speaking at the UN.
Read the caseLiebherr compact excavators: biggest cab in class wins Red Dot Best of the Best
Liebherr drew up its 9- and 11-tonne wheeled excavators from a clean sheet: the small machines got the class's largest cab and a touchscreen OS, scoring 96/100.
Read the caseEA Sports FC 26 films fans' wildest ideas as the game launch — 'The Club Is Yours'
Uncommon turned thousands of FC community suggestions — polar bears on the pitch, a 45-foot goal — into FC 26's cinematic launch film.
Read the casePrince's Hot Chicken: a girlfriend's revenge dish launches a Nashville cuisine
Spiked with cayenne as payback, Thornton Prince's breakfast chicken was so good he built a restaurant on it — and seeded a whole city's signature dish.
Read the caseCenterfruit's voice-AI tongue twister plays over plain phone calls — Abby 2026 GP
A candy brand turns feature-phone calls into dialect-native tongue-twister games — no internet, no app — and wins the Abby 2026 Technology Grand Prix.
Read the caseLemonade's flat fee + Giveback makes unclaimed premiums charity, not profit
Lemonade launched in 2016 as a licensed US insurer: a flat fee for itself, unused premiums given to causes customers choose.
Read the caseXianyu sends users' idle chairs to add seats at Guizhou's Village BA
Alibaba's secondhand marketplace Xianyu collected unused chairs from users and shipped them to packed Village BA courts — idle goods finally got to exercise.
Read the caseKlick turns 10 seconds of speech into a Type 2 diabetes screening test
An AI listens for Type 2 diabetes in short voice clips with up to 89% accuracy — Cannes 2024 and El Ojo 2025 Innovation Grands Prix.
Read the caseEtsy's 2012 blameless postmortems turn failure review into a ritual the industry copies
John Allspaw's 2012 Code as Craft post made failure reviews at Etsy blame-free by design, and the practice spread to become a standard of engineering culture.
Read the caseIt's Better With Spark: a quarter-car trip sells a telco's feeling
Spark dropped coverage claims for a surreal film of a quarter-car journey through New Zealand — and won the Film Craft Grand Prix at Spikes Asia 2026.
Read the caseNikka Whisky's 'No Labels' strips whisky of its stereotypes — ADFEST Lotus Grande
Globally acclaimed but ignored at home, Nikka relaunched by removing labels — literal and metaphorical — with silhouette photography and unlabeled bottles.
Read the caseHelsinki's 2011 Restaurant Day let anyone open a one-day eatery — and it circled the globe
Three Helsinki friends made a festival where anyone can open a one-day eatery without permits; five years in, it had 22,000+ pop-ups in 75 countries.
Read the caseDr. Horrible: Joss Whedon's strike-busting web musical that beat TV at its own Emmys
Locked out of work by the writers' strike, Whedon self-funded a supervillain musical, gave it away free for one weekend — then sold it to Emmy-winning effect.
Read the caseASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo makes two OLED screens equal in a five-mode laptop
The 2026 ROG Zephyrus Duo pairs two identical 16-inch OLED touchscreens with a detachable keyboard and a 320-degree hinge.
Read the caseZelda: Breath of the Wild breaks decades of series rules — 34M sold
Nintendo's GDC 2017 talk: scrap Zelda's rules — linear dungeons, locked progression — to build an 'active' open world that became the series' best seller.
Read the caseSprinkles' 24-hour Cupcake ATM turns vending machines into a $9M cupcake business
Beverly Hills bakery Sprinkles builds the first cupcake ATM in 2012 so fresh cupcakes sell at 3am — six machines grow into a $9M chain.
Read the caseACKO turns India's tailors into heart screeners — Spikes Asia 2026 Direct Grand Prix
ACKO enlists 1 million Indian tailors to flag waist-to-hip heart risk during fittings — 50,000+ check-up calls, 424,904 quotes, Spikes 2026 Direct GP.
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