What sells in China? The answer may be poised for a change. Advertising on the mainland has traditionally been about volume: loud, busy, and overwhelming. (One study found that the average Shanghai resident is exposed to three times as many ads on a typical day as someone in Britain.) But when the global advertising business handed out awards last month at the annual Cannes Lions festival, one of the biggest prizes went to a surprising winner, the obscure twenty-year-old student artist from Hong Kong named Jonathan Mak Long. He had designed a serene outdoor ad for Coca-Cola, and the path that led him to the stage in France was no less surprising: after Steve Jobs died, last October, Mak dreamed up a little tribute—an Apple symbol subtly embedded with Jobs’s silhouette—and the image went viral. It caught the attention of Graham Fink, the chief creative officer at Ogilvy & Mather China, who then hired the student to come up with an ad for Coke in China. He did so—and the result was better than Fink or anyone possibly expected. I asked Mak a few questions about what makes heads turn in China.