The world's best commercials -- or, at least, the ones that won awards -- shown one after the other. There are some brilliant mini-dramas and some funny reversals, but mostly, you watch in wonder at the way image has taken over from utility in the ad game.

Featuring: beer, running shoes and cellphones

Rating: Three stars out of five

Two commercials in the collection of award-winners from the annual Cannes International Festival of Creativity, as the ad festival now calls itself, tell an interesting story about salesmanship.

The first one, from Coke, talks about how great the world is, after all: For every market crash, it says, there are 10 cover versions of "What a Wonderful World"; more Monopoly money is printed than real money, a million moms are making chocolate cake, even as dangerous weapons go into the sky.

The second one, which comes up a few minutes later in the compilation, is from Diesel, "the jeans, clothes, shoes and distraction company," according to its website. It's part of its Diesel Island campaign, in which a puppet tells a bunch of weary campers -- weary but hip -- that they've had a busy day doing things like telling the Pope how good condoms are, but it's going to get busier tomorrow, because the world is still crappy.

Two conflicting views, then, but one question: How do these things sell soft drinks or jeans, not to mention distraction?

The answer, of course, is that soft drinks and jeans pretty well sell themselves: Coke and Diesel and most of the other companies represented at the ad festival are instead hawking images, or feelings, or hipness. You see a commercial for smart phones -- a market researcher interviewing three fairly stupid women, one who happily acknowledges the phone is probably smarter than she is -- and you're sold, because it made you laugh, even if the laughs are cheap. ("What's the square root of nine?" "Thirty-three.")

Sometimes what they're selling is pride. An award-winner from Chrysler -- shown during last year's Super Bowl -- asks what a place like Detroit would know about luxury cars. Plenty, it turns out. "The hottest fires make the hardest steel," the voice-over tells us as a sleek car drives down the streets of the beleaguered city. Then the driver gets out: It's Eminem, saying, "This is the motor city. This is what we do." A beautiful little drama of grit, anger and resilience.

Much of it revolves around classical music: A draught-beer commercial in which ordinary looking people spill and cavort in a pub while a tenor sings about "slo-mo" to the tune of Puccini's Nessun Dorma; a strange Japanese cellphone spot in which a wooden ball rolls down a wooden chute that has been arranged to become a marimba, playing Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring (the cellphone itself also seems to be made of wood); a commercial for MTV Brazil, in which a series of balloons is popped to the tune of the William Tell Overture.

Some are baffling -- a small knitted figure running away from an unravelling fabric in service of some mystery product -- and some are moving. Another cellphone spot, in which a choir at London's Heathrow Airport serenades returning passengers, is a great production. A Nike commercial in which famous soccer plays are connected to the sudden popularity of the stars is a brilliant exegesis of trending. A body-wash commercial that uses an ordinary man, instead of the usual beautiful woman, is a hilarious role reversal: The announcer talks about caressing the body's crevasses as he pees in the shower. ("Hair. Body. Balls," is the catchphrase.) The Canadian ad agency, John St., put together a superb marketing promotion by showing how they would do a campaign for a girl's eighth birthday party.

The collection is more about such creativity than laughs, and it's introduced by a newspaper advertising executive as a kind of product reel that seems to be aimed at industry professionals. Another oddity is the fact that a few ads are shown twice: once in the category they won, and again when the grand prizes are announced. That's always been the problem with commercials: They keep showing them.

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