Zed Anwar aka ZedTrafficker

One brief, one minute

Zed Anwar is a London art director who works as ZedTrafficker, and describes himself as an award-winning art director, AI image and video creative, conceptual artist and pitch winner^[1][3]. His site sums up the approach in one line: say something real, and say it with teeth^[1]. He joined X in November 2012 and has posted more than 126,000 times there, but Ideas We Love, the ideas newsletter by Tom Darlington and Matt Prentis, says LinkedIn is where most people find him^[3][2].

Much of his work starts on One Minute Briefs, the daily creative challenge from the Bank of Creativity community: one brief, one rule, one minute to make an ad^[2]. In July 2018 his answer to a World Cup brief for KFC, Home of Chicken #ItsComingHome, was retweeted by KFC UK, and his site puts it at 139,000 interactions after that^[25][27]. The same month he posted a video from the One Minute Briefs Awards; his site lists him there as Creative of the Year^[26][1].

A world without nature

On World Wildlife Day, 3 March 2020, he instigated an idea on One Minute Briefs: brands would remove the animals and plants from their logos, to show what a world without nature looks like^[4]. Brands and teams joined in on the day. In June 2020 One Minute Briefs announced that he had won The Drum Chip Shop Award for the campaign, "for instigating the idea" and for the ideas he shared on the day^[4]. It is the one award on this page that AI LIVE could confirm with a third party.

A year later WWF took the idea worldwide as #WorldWithoutNature. On World Wildlife Day 2021 Premier League clubs including Aston Villa, Wolves and West Brom took the animals off their crests^[6]. The campaign's case film, hosted on his portfolio, reports 294.2 million impressions and 54.2 million engagements on Twitter. Those are totals for the whole campaign, not the reach of his own account^[5]. Football clubs have stripped their crests for it again since, and in 2023 the campaign added an AI strand with Brave Bison and the AI/CC Creative Community; that coverage does not name him^[7][33].

For instigating the idea & sharing prolific ideas on the day that resulted in brand & team involvement.

One Minute Briefs, announcing his Chip Shop Award^[4]

The logo is the idea

The thread through his best-known images is the brand mark itself, hidden in the world. During the Paris 2024 Olympics he posted an unofficial poster of Simone Biles mid-routine inside a ring, her body forming the three-pointed Mercedes-Benz star^[16][32]. It travelled far beyond his own feed: Ideas We Love puts it at more than 300 million social impressions, a figure for the image's spread across platforms rather than for his account, where the pinned post has about 13,000 views^[2][3]. Much of that spread happened without his name on it. Accounts reposted it as if it were a real Mercedes-Benz campaign: a reply by @xveritasnow under a viral Biles post has 925,000 views on X, and The Ad Professor led a thread of the week's most creative ads with it, at 692,000 views^[41][42]. It was posted to Reddit's r/interestingasfuck, r/pics, r/DesignPorn and r/AdPorn under the same mistaken caption^[44]. media-marketing.com, which told the story of the image that August, reported that he was working as a hospital porter, not in an agency, when it went viral^[16].

The same trick runs through his spec work: an Audi crossing a frozen bridge whose four arches and their reflections make the four rings, a McDonald's poster where the glowing filament of a lightbulb is the golden arches, and drive-thru posters styled as personalised number plates that read B16 MAC and LR6 FRIE5^[8][30]. In August 2023 he said publicly that a Leo Burnett UK campaign for McDonald's echoed his number-plate posters, which he had posted about four months earlier; Leo Burnett and McDonald's both rejected the claim, as Campaign and Marketing Beat reported^[11][12].

Turned the other way, the logo becomes a warning. A Greenpeace concept carves the Jaguar leaper into rock as a fossil, above a line about ending our dependency on fossil fuels^[8]. #WorldWithoutNature works the same way in reverse: take the nature out of the logo and the logo stops making sense^[5].

Ghosts in the ocean

In October 2022 he posted a Greenpeace spec ad in which a plastic carrier bag drifting underwater becomes a ghost. Creapills and Famous Campaigns shared it within days^[9][10]. A print series followed, with turtles and sea life tangled in supermarket bags under the line "Plastic never dies. But wildlife does."^[29]

For Halloween 2023 he turned the idea into an AI film of about a minute. A bag sinks through the dark, slowly finds a screaming face, and drifts into a passing sea turtle, ending on the line "Rescue our oceans from the haunting spectre of plastic pollution"^[8][40]. Culture Pub and Artificial Inspiration shared it^[14]. The same week Famous Campaigns picked up Hallobeanz, his Halloween spec ad for Heinz Beanz, which Heinz UK answered on X^[13]. His site lists an AIMI Awards 2025 win for the Greenpeace film; AI LIVE has not been able to confirm it with the awards^[8].

He has talked about #WorldWithoutNature and the Greenpeace work on stage, at GEI15, the Green Events and Innovations conference^[15].

Generative AI is not a shortcut... it's a new creative language.

Zed Anwar^[8]

Spec ads that look commissioned

With AI in the kit, the spec ads became films. His Creative AI page shows a liquid-chrome Nike Air floating over London parks and deserts, guarded by chrome aliens; a pianist playing an Audi like a grand piano to a packed concert hall; a British Airways film told entirely in the mirrored lenses of aviator sunglasses; and a giant Nivea SPF 50 bottle whose shadow shelters a crowd on Copacabana^[8][35]. In May 2025 Blockbusters Meet Nerf restaged action films with children and foam blasters, which Ideas We Love called a movie trailer for your inner child^[19][2].

He generates and iterates in Midjourney, Runway, Sora, Firefly and ChatGPT, and finishes in Adobe's suite^[8][1]. "I don't use AI to replace human creativity, I use it to extend it," his site says^[8]. Ideas We Love lists Guinness, KFC, Nivea, Unilever, WWF, OceanSaver and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Trust among the brands that have commissioned him; Mercedes-Benz, McDonald's and Nike appear as unofficial spec work^[2]. His Finish print ad ran in the Evening Standard in September 2024, according to his LinkedIn post^[17]. Ad accounts keep picking the work up: Creapills shared his WWF Sound Wave concept, "what if the planet could scream?", in May 2025, to 1,054 reactions^[45], and Famous Campaigns a Lacoste conceptual packaging display in May 2026^[18][34].

Stink Studios, and AI LIVE

In February 2026 AI LIVE co-host Andrew Davis told the weekly show that Zed had been picked up by Stink Studios, and held him up as a One Minute Briefs creative who added AI and could now answer far more briefs^[20]. That is AI LIVE's report: Stink has not published his title or start date.

The next month host Chris Branch met him in person for the first time, at the Bionic Awards in London, after years of talking online^[21]. On the weekly show he is named among the spec ad makers whose work is mostly images, print and out-of-home ideas rather than video^[24]. The week after the show reviewed Stink Studios' PlayStation spot in October 2026, when Chris said he had not yet been able to confirm who worked on its AI^[23], it reviewed a commissioned Stink Studios ad for Synthesia, the AI avatar company, in which a colleague's avatar looks and sounds just like him and he is only there to train it. Chris said Zed was partly involved, and called him a really good generative AI guy who has been in it from the early days^[22].