Reunion

Why it works

An old man in Delhi tells his granddaughter about the best friend he lost at Partition in 1947: kite-flying in Lahore, sweets pinched from the boy's family shop. She turns his memories into searches, tracks down the shop, reaches the friend's grandson and arranges for the elderly Pakistani to fly in and surprise her grandfather on his birthday. Made by Ogilvy & Mather India and directed by Amit Sharma, the film went up on YouTube first, then ran in cinemas and on Indian television with shorter cutdowns. Ogilvy chose Partition partly because it still stirs strong feelings, and the spot became a hit on both sides of the border, praised by a Pakistani journalist from the Aman ki Asha peace initiative. It is studied for demonstrating search, flight details and weather entirely inside a story. The agency reported more than 50 million views and a 38 per cent rise in awareness of new search features, and it won Silver and Bronze PR Lions at Cannes in 2014.