IKEA Spain has released “Yo Me Quedo En Casa” (I Stay Home), a commercial designed as an ode to the home as refuge during the COVID-19 pandemic. The advertising campaign encourages viewers to celebrate their home, a place where in a simple and improvised way they can enjoy leisure and work in a new way, approaching their time of isolation with imagination, love, patience and a sense of humour. The #YoMeQuedoEnCasa campaign includes by a series of digital elements with which the brand invites all of us to see our house from a different perspective and to make it a place where during this time, we can enjoy new experiences and sensations together.

NO MORE and National Domestic Violence Hotline are running an advertising campaign aimed at people who have recently started working from home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Listening from home campaign, designed to be co-branded with other organisations, raises awareness of the increased danger being experienced by victims who are caught at home with their abusers. Like Covid-19, signs of abuse are not always visible. The campaign informs people about the warning signs, encourages them to get help if they hear or observe incidents of domestic violence and asks for donations to support the helpline’s response efforts. Poster ads, run on social media and outdoors, present women alone indoors, with the grim reminder that they’ve been been isolated and living in fear, for months, or even for years.

Honda is running “Feel More from the Ground”, a commercial celebrating the Civic’s low driving position. A young woman heads off in her red Honda Civic, cameras capturing every angle from below. We see a chasing dog, a crack in the road, the shoes of a runner, the adventurous steps taken by a pigeon, the close encounter with death experienced by an ant, a puddle turned into a splash pool, all within the frame of a dog’s observation. The super: “The closer to the road, the more you feel”.

Fanta, the Coca-Cola orange brand, is celebrating fun through “Idiots are Amazing”, an integrated advertising campaign launched in Europe. YouTube video stars, known for their idiotic and weird stunts, have been discovered and made larger than life through a suite of films showing their dedicated preparation. The champions of play are filmed training for a gymnastic giraffe stunt, diving into snow in a swimsuit, dancing in a large pair of stretched pants, wheelbarrow tricks, and drinking coffee while reading a book, sliding on the ice on the way to work in Norway. The four stunts and their build-up routines, edited into 15 second videos, are spliced together with a 90 second soundtrack worthy of a Nike inspirational anthem. Out of home and print advertisements supplement the heroic idiots with further examples of playful idiocy.

The Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice is running “Stop the Spread”, a campaign addressing coronavirus-related xenophobia. At the heart of the campaign are bottles of hand sanitiser labelled “Stop the Spread – of racism”. On March 3, the bottles were given out in crowded spaces in Toronto by volunteers dressed in biohazard suits, with a warning: “Ignorance has reached epidemic proportions”. The bottles drive people to the campaign website, StopTheSpread.ca. Word spread quickly around the city, province, and country, as news outlets covered the story throughout the day, and many Torontonians shared the initiative on social media.