Category
Commercials
Television and cinema spots: the films that defined the craft of advertising, from the Super Bowl stage to the British ad break.
2020s
-
2025Act Like You Know
Actors, Walton Goggins tells the camera, can make you believe they know what they are doing when they do not.
-
2024Like a Good Neighbaaa
State Farm treated its return to the Super Bowl like a film release.
-
2023Forever
A chocolate Lab puppy called Bear and a girl called Ava grow up together in sixty seconds, through childhood and college to Ava having a child of…
-
2023R.I.P. Leon
A neighbourhood lizard-sitter finds his charge, Leon, lying motionless and anxiously texts the terrible news.
-
2022Less Talk, More Bitcoin
For most of a minute, a small QR code drifted across a black screen, changing colour each time it touched an edge — a knowing riff on the bouncing…
-
2021Superb Owl
Five seconds, bought market by market.
-
2020Groundhog Day
Bill Murray wakes at 6:00 a.m. to the same clock-radio song and runs into Stephen Tobolowsky’s relentless Ned Ryerson — but this time Phil Connors…
-
2020Smaht Pahk
The new Sonata could slip into a tight space at the click of a button, but the feature had a forgettable name: Remote Smart Parking Assist.
-
2020You Can't Stop Us
Ninety seconds of split screen in which 36 pairs of athletes, elite and everyday, from Serena Williams and LeBron James to Colin Kaepernick and…
2010s
-
2019We All Win
Children with limited mobility talk about what gaming gives them and show how they play with the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which Microsoft designed…
-
2019Back-to-School Essentials
The most devastating bait-and-switch in PSA history.
-
2018Alexa Loses Her Voice
Alexa coughs mid-forecast and falls silent, and Jeff Bezos, playing himself, is assured by his staff that replacements are standing by.
-
2018The Legend of Big John
A young man named Big Mjohnana sails from his village in 1650, shrugs off a jaguar, a whale, a shark and a giant squid, and lands in Holland in…
-
2018It's a Tide Ad
The cleverest media hack in Super Bowl history.
-
2018Dream Crazy
The defining case of brand risk in the social-media era.
-
2017Calling JohnMalkovich.com
John Malkovich, newly launched as a menswear designer, sits in his studio on the phone to another John Malkovich, the man who already owns…
-
2017Daughter
A girl in a battered helmet races a soapbox cart downhill against a field of boys while her father, in voiceover, wonders what to tell her: that…
-
2017The Journey
A mother and her young daughter leave Mexico and head north on foot, by truck and by train, intercut with construction workers building something we…
-
2017The Talk
Across several decades, Black parents sit their children down for a conversation that most white families never have to hold: how to carry…
-
2016Super Bowl Babies Choir
For its 50th Super Bowl, the NFL turned a piece of sports folklore into a choir.
-
2015Justino
Justino guards a mannequin factory by night, so he never meets the colleagues who work by day, until he starts talking to them through the dummies,…
-
2014It's Beautiful
"America the Beautiful" passes from voice to voice and from language to language (seven of them, by Coca-Cola's count) over a montage of American…
-
2014Mistakes
Two cars are about to collide: one driven by a man in a shirt and tie, late for work and going a little too fast, the other by a father who has made…
-
2014Puppy Love
A Labrador puppy has fallen for a Clydesdale, and even after it is adopted it keeps coming back home to the horse.
-
2014The Big Leap
A man sits a few centimetres from the woman he loves, working up the nerve for a first kiss, and the film turns that moment into a literal plunge:…
-
2014Unsung Hero
A young man with almost nothing spends his days on small kindnesses: he waters a dying plant, feeds a stray dog, brings bananas to an elderly…
-
2014Monty the Penguin
The peak of the modern Christmas-ad genre John Lewis invented.
-
2013Chicken
To Diana Ross's "Upside Down", handlers lift, sway and twist live chickens, and while the birds' bodies dance in every direction, their heads stay…
-
2013Farmer
Essentially a two-minute slideshow that never speaks its brand name, "Farmer" lays the late broadcaster Paul Harvey's original recording of "So God…
-
2013The Pony
On a windswept Shetland hillside a stocky little pony called Socks moonwalks and tosses his mane to Fleetwood Mac's “Everywhere”.
-
2012Halftime in America
A lean silhouette walks down a darkened stadium tunnel and Clint Eastwood's rasp begins: "It's halftime in America, too." For two minutes,…
-
2012L'Odyssée de Cartier
Cartier's emblem, the panther, comes to life and sets off across the world of the house: through a snowbound St Petersburg, along the Great Wall of…
-
2012Tips From Former Smokers ("Terrie")
Terrie, a former smoker, shows viewers how she gets ready for the day now that treatment for throat cancer has cost her her teeth, her hair and her…
-
2012Meet the Superhumans
The film that changed how disability is shown on screen.
-
2012Best Job ("Thank You, Mom")
How a company with no sports products won the Olympics.
-
2011Back to the Start
A farmer's family pig farm grows, step by step, into an industrial animal factory of cramped pens and hormone-pumped livestock, until a crisis of…
-
2011Cómicos
Santiago Segura, weighed down by the day's bad news, reveals a pact among the people whose job is making Spain laugh: when gloom starts winning,…
-
2011Last Dictator Standing
A Robert Mugabe lookalike sits alone at a dinner table laid for guests who will never arrive.
-
2011Legend ("Ghost Chips")
At a house party, a young man silently agonises over whether to stop his drunk mate George from driving, and imagines what staying quiet might cost,…
-
2011The Bear (L'Ours)
For most of the film, Paul Bearman is a tantrum-prone Hollywood director shooting a gothic epic; the twist is that he is a bearskin rug shaped by…
-
2011Born of Fire ("Imported from Detroit")
A bankrupt car company from a written-off city bought the longest Super Bowl ad to that point — two full minutes during Super Bowl XLV, February 6,…
-
2011The Force
A pint-sized Darth Vader tries to use the Force on the laundry machine, the dog, a sandwich — and finally, apparently, on the family Passat,…
-
2010Selinah
Selinah, a woman with AIDS, gets into bed looking healthy, and over a series of shots taken across 90 days she seems to waste away until she is skin…
-
2010Parisian Love
Google's first-ever TV commercial told a love story using nothing but a search box: "study abroad paris france" leads to "impress a french girl,"…
-
2010Game ("Betty White")
The spot that launched one of the most durable creative platforms in modern advertising.
-
2010Write the Future
The biggest canvas sports advertising has attempted: a three-minute epic in which a single touch — Rooney's loose pass, Ronaldo's free kick —…
2000s
-
2009Compare the Meerkat ("Simples")
Aleksandr Orlov, a self-important Russian meerkat in a smoking jacket, complains to camera that car-insurance shoppers keep turning up at his…
-
2009Free Doritos
In an office break room, a worker insists his snow globe is a crystal ball, predicts free Doritos for everyone, then hurls it through the glass…
-
2009Walk-In Fridge
At a housewarming, a woman proudly shows her friends the new walk-in closet and they shriek with delight, until even louder screams erupt from the…
-
2009Xixi no Banho ("Pee in the Shower")
A cheerful animated film inviting absolutely everyone to take up a slightly naughty habit: weeing in the shower.
-
2009ZooZoos
Egg-headed white creatures with balloon bodies and stick-thin limbs gabble in a language nobody understands, giggle and fall in love through tiny…
-
2008Awareness Test ("Moonwalking Bear")
A minute-long film that asks viewers to count how many passes a team in white makes in a game of basketball, gives the answer, then asks whether…
-
2008Baby
A baby at a computer keyboard, speaking in an adult man's voice, brushes off the idea that he is too young to invest.
-
2007Believe ("Diorama")
No gameplay, no graphics, no product shots.
-
2007Jaago Re (Politician)
A haughty politician is put on the spot in front of a crowd by a young man who questions his credentials and record.
-
2007Picnic
A Thai family picnics in broad daylight while a procession of folk ghosts drifts past their mat.
-
2007Pinkie ("Speeding. No One Thinks Big of You.")
Young men show off behind the wheel, and everyone they hope to impress, from young women by the road to an elderly woman and the mates riding with…
-
2007The Shirato Family (White Family)
The Shirato household looks ordinary until you notice two things: the father is a white Hokkaido dog who lectures his family in a human voice, and…
-
2007Gorilla
Ninety seconds of a gorilla waiting, then drumming the fill of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" — no chocolate on screen until the end card.
-
2006Alien Jones (Earth Survey series)
In each episode Tommy Lee Jones, playing an alien sent to survey Earth, takes another Japanese job, from sumo referee to island doctor, watches the…
-
2006Bienvenido a la república independiente de tu casa
A child's voice reads out the constitution of a home over shaky family camcorder footage: every republic needs an anthem and a flag, the inhabitants…
-
2006Happiness Factory
A young man drops a coin into a Coca-Cola vending machine and the camera follows it into an animated kingdom inside: pig-helicopters ferry the…
-
2006Get a Mac ("Mac vs. PC")
Sixty-six spots, one white void, two guys.
-
2006The Most Interesting Man in the World
Beer advertising's rulebook said young, party, bikinis; Dos Equis cast a silver-bearded man in his sixties and made him a legend: "He once had an…
-
2005Australia Day Lamb
Former AFL footballer Sam Kekovich sits at a desk in front of the Australian flag and delivers a deadpan, mock-statesmanlike rant against all things…
-
2005Love Story
A four-episode soap opera that ran on Thai television for two months: Jum, a scruffy tomboy, blurts out her love for the school's handsome sepak…
-
2005Not Even Once ("Just Once")
A teenage girl promises she will try meth "just once", then steals "just once", then sleeps with a man for the drug "just once", until her little…
-
2005Big Ad
Advertising parodying its own megalomania.
-
2005noitulovE
Three drinkers raise their pints — and time reverses.
-
2005Balls (and "Paint")
The shortest script in the business — "we let 250,000 brightly coloured balls loose down the hills of San Francisco" — produced one of the most…
-
2004Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi walks into a bare hut, sits cross-legged, switches on a webcam and begins to speak, and his message of peace appears on a skyscraper…
-
2004Grrr ("Hate Something, Change Something")
A diesel-engine ad built on hate.
-
2003Boy and Pug (You and I)
A small boy wanders through a rain-washed Goan day, to school, the barber's, the bath, and a pug trots after him wherever he goes, to the song "You…
-
2003Outfit (Identity Theft)
A middle-aged man sits in his wood-panelled den with a can of beer in front of the TV, and out of his mouth comes the giddy voice of a young woman…
-
2003Terry Tate: Office Linebacker
A 300-pound linebacker levels office workers for leaving no coffee in the pot.
-
2003Cog
Two minutes of Honda Accord parts toppling, rolling and swinging into each other in a flawless Rube Goldberg chain reaction — ending with a finished…
-
2003What Happens Here, Stays Here
The most successful destination slogan ever written — and a masterclass in selling an emotional truth instead of attractions.
-
2002Bus
A battered bus lurches across the Rajasthan desert so overloaded that villagers cling to every side and crowd the roof, swaying in eerie unison over…
-
2002Do Boond Zindagi Ki ("Two Drops of Life")
Amitabh Bachchan, India's best-known film star, stands at a polio vaccination booth and rebukes the nation for how few parents have turned up.
-
2002Lamp
A woman unplugs her old red desk lamp and leaves it on the curb.
-
2002Metamorfosis
A young man drenches himself in Axe and is promptly swarmed by women.
-
2002Para todos
Coca-Cola bottles and cans appear against a plain white background while a voice works through the people the drink is for: the fat and the thin,…
-
2002Respect
Five months after September 11, the Budweiser Clydesdales leave their stables, travel through snowy countryside and over the Brooklyn Bridge, then…
-
2002Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola
Bollywood star Aamir Khan, in a run of regional disguises from a Punjabi farmer who chills bottles in his well to a Bengali professor, insists that…
-
2002The Sculptor
In India, a young man falls for the Peugeot 206 he has seen in a print ad and sets about turning his boxy Hindustan Ambassador into one.
-
2002Odyssey
A man and a woman sprint through wall after wall of a building — plaster exploding around them — then out into a forest, up two trees, and into the…
-
2001Bostezo (Yawn)
Not a word is spoken.
-
2000Body Bags
Outside a major tobacco company's headquarters in New York, a group of young people unload body bags onto the street and pile them up, 1,200 of…
-
2000Mano (¿Te gusta conducir?)
Filmed from inside the car, the spot never shows a BMW.
-
2000Not Happy, Jan!
A businesswoman discovers that her employee, Jan, has forgotten to book the company's advertisement in the new Yellow Pages, so the business will…
-
2000The Rant ("I Am Canadian")
A polite young man in a flannel shirt steps up to a cinema microphone and, building from a bashful murmur to a roar over "Land of Hope and Glory",…
-
2000Cat Herders
How to make an invisible IT company famous in sixty seconds: take the management cliché "it's like herding cats" literally.
-
2000Bear
A nature documentary ambushed by slapstick: a fisherman kung-fu fights a grizzly bear for a salmon — crotch-kick included — to prove John West…
1990s
-
1999Bugger
A farmer tries out his new Hilux around the property and keeps underestimating its power: a fence goes down, a tractor tips over, a tree stump flies…
-
1999Michael Power
Michael Power, an impeccably dressed action hero of no specified African nationality, foils villains and saves the day in mini-adventures several…
-
1999Whassup?
Proof that advertising can borrow culture honestly instead of manufacturing it.
-
1999When I Grow Up
The dot-com era's one unarguably great Super Bowl ad.
-
1999Surfer
A beer's pour time turned into myth.
-
1999Flat Eric (Sta-Prest)
A scruffy yellow glove puppet nodding to a techno bassline in a beat-up American car sold sharply creased trousers — and nobody could explain why it…
-
1997Think Different ("The Crazy Ones")
A manifesto in place of a product.
-
1997Priceless
A financial company admitting money isn't everything — and building the longest-running campaign formula in modern advertising on the admission.
-
1996Mamíferos
Three- and four-year-olds dressed as baby mammals play in front of the camera while an adult voice slowly sings "O elefante é fã de Parmalat" (the…
-
1995Frogs
Three frogs on a swamp log croak one syllable each — "Bud," "weis," "er" — until the croaks sync into the brand name.
-
1994Cricket (Kuch Khaas Hai)
A young woman in a patterned dress nibbles Dairy Milk in the stands; when her batsman hits the winning six, she slips past security and dances,…
-
1994Yebo Gogo (Windmills)
A white yuppie and his girlfriend stop at a roadside stall where an older Black man sells wire windmills.
-
1993The Showdown (Jordan vs. Bird)
Michael Jordan and Larry Bird play an escalating game of H-O-R-S-E for a Big Mac — "off the expressway, over the river, off the billboard, through…
-
1993Tested for the Unexpected
A tyre ad as art film.
-
1993Aaron Burr (got milk?)
The campaign that sold a product through its absence.
-
1992Hare Jordan
Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny team up in a gym to outwit a gang of basketball bullies, mixing live action with hand-drawn Looney Tunes slapstick…
-
1992Hungry? (Moa / Synthetoceras)
Starving cavemen chase dinner across a prehistoric plain, first a towering moa bird, then a Synthetoceras that wears the tribe out by popping up…
-
1992New Can
A red Lamborghini pulls into a dusty roadside café, Cindy Crawford steps out in a white tank top and cut-offs, and two small boys stare as she buys…
-
1992Orange Man ("You Know When You've Been Tango'd")
The anti-ad that out-punched Coca-Cola's budgets.
-
1991Glug Glug
A small boy playing in his bedroom fills a toy red Ferrari with Sasol Super 100, the fuel going in with a "glug glug".
-
1991Heritage Minutes
Sixty-second dramas about moments in Canadian history, broadcast in the commercial breaks: the three Victoria Cross winners from one Winnipeg street…
-
1991Não é assim uma Brastemp
In a series of mock-confessional films, ordinary people settled in armchairs describe an appliance from another brand with embarrassed hesitation:…
-
1991Uh-Huh (You Got the Right One, Baby)
Ray Charles sits at a grand piano with a big band behind him, while three backing singers in black minidresses and wigs answer each line with a…
-
1991Be Like Mike
The jingle that defined athlete aspiration — written on a tablecloth in a crisis.
-
1990Le Lion (La Lionne)
A woman and a lion meet nose to nose on an African hilltop, both desperate for the same bottle of Perrier, and she wins it with a cry so primal it…
1980s
-
1989Bud Bowl
Anheuser-Busch turned Super Bowl XXIII, on January 22, 1989, into a game within the game.
-
1989Girlfriend ("If You Drink, Then Drive, You're a Bloody Idiot")
A young woman, injured in a crash caused by her drunk boyfriend, is rushed through a hospital emergency department while a trauma team works on her.
-
1989Hamara Bajaj
Ordinary Indians go about their day with their Bajaj scooters, polishing them, checking their hair in the mirror, haggling over fish; a woman rides…
-
1989Jeong
Since 1989 Orion has sold its chocolate-coated marshmallow cake not simply as a snack but as a token of jeong, the Korean sense of warm, unspoken…
-
1989Supermarkt ("Tina, wat kosten die Kondome?")
A shy young man (Ingolf Lück) tries to buy condoms without anyone noticing, until the supermarket cashier (Hella von Sinnen) wrecks his discretion…
-
1989Face
Thousands of schoolchildren in coloured costumes, filmed from helicopters over Utah, assemble into a winking eye, an ear, lips — and finally a…
-
Still going. Nothing outlasts the Energizer.Energizer (Eveready)1989
The Energizer Bunny
A parody that outlived everything it parodied.
-
1989Bo Knows
A product launch disguised as a tall tale.
-
1988Christmas Express (Hometown Express X'mas)
On a Shinkansen platform at night, a dressed-up teenage girl waits for her long-distance boyfriend; the passengers disperse, he seems not to have…
-
1988Mile Sur Mera Tumhara
Pandit Bhimsen Joshi sings a phrase in Raga Bhairavi beside a waterfall, and the same melody travels through fourteen languages, landscapes and…
-
1988Just Do It (launch spot, "Walt Stack")
Three words that outgrew sport.
-
1987Hitler
A single black dot appears on screen, then dozens, then hundreds, slowly assembling a face while Ferreira Martins' measured voiceover lists the…
-
1987Monkey (Walk Man '87)
For thirty seconds a Japanese macaque named Choromatsu stands upright on two legs, Walkman in hand and headphones on, eyes closed as if lost in the…
-
1987O Primeiro Sutiã (My First Bra)
Ninety seconds, no sales pitch: 11-year-old Patrícia Lucchesi lives through a girl's first bra, including the moment she first sees herself in it,…
-
1987Spuds MacKenzie: The Original Party Animal
A limousine pulls up outside a club and the guest of honor appears: a bull terrier with a black patch over one eye who, by the end, is strutting…
-
1987The Grim Reaper
A hooded Death waits at the end of a bowling alley and rolls a ball into men, women and children standing in as pins, while a grave narrator warns…
-
1987Photo Booth ("Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet")
The finest execution of one of advertising's longest-running comic formulas: life goes wrong, a Hamlet is lit, Bach plays, dignity is restored.
-
1987This Is Your Brain on Drugs ("Fried Egg")
Ten seconds of visual rhetoric that defined a decade: an egg ("this is your brain"), a hot pan ("this is drugs"), the sizzle ("this is your brain on…
-
1986Don't Mess with Texas
An anti-litter campaign that never uses the word litter.
-
1986The California Raisins ("I Heard It Through the Grapevine")
A commodity board with a boring product — dried grapes — created pop stars out of clay.
-
1986Don't Die of Ignorance ("Monolith")
The most consequential public-health advertising Britain has produced.
-
1985Even Apeldoorn bellen
Something goes absurdly wrong, and the fix arrives in three words: "Even Apeldoorn bellen," just call Apeldoorn, the town where insurer Centraal…
-
1985Vince and Larry, the Crash Test Dummies ("You Could Learn a Lot from a Dummy")
Two talking crash test dummies, the cynical veteran Vince and his eager young partner Larry, who take every collision so that viewers don't have to.
-
1985Launderette
The ad that relaunched a fading product as the most desired object in Britain.
-
1984Come and Say G'day (Shrimp on the Barbie)
Paul Hogan, a television star at home but unknown in the United States, speaks straight to Americans: they look like they need a "fair dinkum"…
-
1984Lalitaji
In a busy market a housewife in a crisp white sari haggles with a vegetable seller over a few rupees.
-
19841984
A product launch staged as dystopian cinema.
-
1984Fluffy Bun ("Where's the Beef?")
Three elderly women inspect an absurdly fluffy competitor's bun until 81-year-old Clara Peller barks the question that ate American culture:…
-
1984Prouder, Stronger, Better ("Morning in America")
The most influential positive political ad ever made — the counterweight to "Daisy" in every politics-of-advertising syllabus.
-
1983Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk
The Ad Council and the U.S.
-
1983J.R. Hartley ("Fly Fishing")
An elderly man trudges from bookshop to bookshop seeking a copy of "Fly Fishing by J.R.
-
1981Fast Paced World ("Fast Talker")
A frantic executive, played by John Moschitta, fires through a working day without drawing breath: hiring a candidate in seconds, putting Pete in…
-
1981Slip! Slop! Slap! (Sid the Seagull)
A cartoon seagull in board shorts, T-shirt and hat dances across the screen singing three verbs that became a national reflex: slip on a shirt, slop…
-
1981Be All You Can Be
The line that rebuilt an institution's self-image.
-
1980Take a Bite Out of Crime ("McGruff the Crime Dog")
A world-weary cartoon bloodhound in a trench coat, modelled partly on the TV detective Columbo, who first appeared on American television in…
1970s
-
1979Hey Kid, Catch! ("Mean Joe Greene")
The template for the heartwarming Super Bowl spot.
-
1978Garoto Bombril (first spot)
A slight, shy young man looks straight at the viewer and introduces a Bombril detergent that promises to be gentler on the skin.
-
1977Monks ("Brother Dominic")
The ad that proved the Super Bowl could launch a product story, seven years before Apple's "1984." Monk Brother Dominic, asked to produce 500 more…
-
1976Football, Meat Pies, Kangaroos and Holden Cars
A quick-cut montage of beaches, yachting, cricket, Aussie Rules, koalas, kangaroos, meat pies and the flag, intercut with Kingswoods, Toranas and…
-
1975Liril Girl (Waterfall)
A young woman plays, dives and splashes beneath a forest waterfall, the film cutting between the cascade and an ordinary bathroom shower to a "La,…
-
1974Tough Under Fire
A marksman loads a .30-caliber rifle, aims at a padlock hanging on a bull's-eye target and, in slow motion, blows a half-inch hole clean through it.
-
1974Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach
A pseudo-scientific absurdity that ran for three decades.
-
1974Martians ("For Mash Get Smash")
A family of giggling robot Martians watch Earth people peel potatoes, boil them "for twenty of their minutes" and "smash them all to bits" — and…
-
1974Tastes Great, Less Filling
The campaign that created the light-beer category.
-
Let Noxzema cream your face.Noxzema1973
Let Noxzema Cream Your Face
Joe Namath, the Jets quarterback and Super Bowl III MVP, grins into the camera: "I'm so excited.
-
1973The 60-Year-Old Swede
Two men jog side by side at the same easy pace while a narrator explains that they are evenly matched, because the average 30-year-old Canadian is…
-
1973The Bike Ride ("Boy on the Bike")
Forty-seven seconds of manufactured nostalgia so potent it rewired Britain's memory.
-
1972Three Brothers ("Mikey Likes It")
Two boys refuse to try a cereal that's "supposed to be good for you," so they push it on their little brother Mikey, "who hates everything" — and he…
-
1971Hilltop ("I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke")
The template for the brand anthem: no product demo, no claims — just a song, a hillside outside Rome, and young people from around the world holding…
-
1971Because I'm Worth It
Four words, written in fury, that changed who beauty advertising talks to.
-
1971You Deserve a Break Today
The jingle that turned fast food into permission.
-
1971The Crying Indian ("People Start Pollution. People Can Stop It.")
One of the most effective — and most re-examined — PSAs ever aired.
1960s
-
1969Funeral
A procession of limousines heads to a funeral while the dead man, Maxwell E.
-
1969Spicy Meatball
A commercial inside a commercial: an actor shooting a spot for fictional "Magadini's" meatballs blows take after take — "Mamma mia, that's a spicy…
-
1966The Disadvantages
A rapid sequence of two-second black-and-white vignettes in which smokers discover all the awkward ways an extra-long cigarette gets in the way of…
-
1964Snow Plow
A Beetle ploughs through thigh-deep drifts while an unhurried narrator asks a question nobody had thought to ask: "Have you ever wondered how the…
-
1964Daisy ("Peace, Little Girl")
The most famous political ad ever made aired exactly once.
1950s
-
1959You're Never Alone with a Strand (The Lonely Man)
A lone man in a trench coat, hat pushed back Sinatra-style, lights a cigarette on a rain-soaked London street at night while a mournful theme plays:…
-
1957Louie the Fly
A gravel-voiced cartoon gangster fly boasts about spreading disease and fears no one except the man with the can of Mortein.
-
1956Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking (torture tests)
For two decades from 1956, former NBC anchorman John Cameron Swayze put Timex watches through televised ordeals: strapped to a cliff diver, attacked…
-
1956The PG Tips Chimps
In 1956 Brooke Bond began dressing chimpanzees in human clothes for its PG Tips commercials, borrowing the idea from the chimps' tea parties at…
-
1953The Hamm's Bear
A clumsy, good-natured cartoon bear tumbles off a rolling log, plays hockey, fishes and fumbles his way around the North Woods while a tom-tom beat…
About Commercials
This is our list of the best TV commercials of all time: 30-second spots, long-form cinema films and campaigns that ran for decades, from the early years of television advertising to the present.
Great commercials tend to do one of a few things exceptionally well. Some tell a complete story in under a minute. Some turn a product demonstration into theatre. Some give a brand a character, a jingle or a line that people repeat for years. A few change the medium itself, as Apple's "1984" did for the Super Bowl.
How to use this list
Each entry explains why the spot works, credits the agency and director where they are documented, and lists the sources behind every claim. Where an official or archive upload exists, you can watch the commercial on the page. For more, browse the Super Bowl, Emmy winners and Great British Ads collections.