Get your tissues ready. There wasn’t a single dry eye in the room at the end of a session at Cannes Lions last week on the power of creativity as a force for gender balancing the world.

WPP’S UK country manager Karen Blackett OBE was joined on stage by Unilever’s EVP of global marketing & global head of diversity and inclusion Aline Santos and P&G’s global design officer Phil Duncan, as they discussed how their brands are playing their part in creating global gender equality. 

We’ve collated some of the ads they showed as the power of these is self-evident.

i. #ShareTheLoad, Ariel India, P&G. Their global design officer Duncan also unveiled the version of this ad which has been created for the French market. It is quite different to the original work but equally powerful.

ii. Thank you, Mom, P&G (US). This is Duncan’s favourite piece of recent work they did around the Winter Olympics:

iii. ‘Hair Talk’, Sunsilk, Unilever. Unilever’s EVP of global marketing Santos shared this as her favourite piece of work they’ve done recently which aims to break the transgender taboo in Thailand.

iv. #RealMoms, Baby Dove, Unilever. P&G’s Duncan chose this as his favourite recent campaign from his biggest competitor and shared a very personal story about his own mum who had given him up for adoption when he was a baby because she felt she couldn’t provide for him.