Collection
Great British Ads
Wit, understatement and film-making craft from British agencies, from Hovis and Heineken to Guinness, Honda and John Lewis.
2020s
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2023The Everyday Tactician
To launch Football Manager 2024 on Xbox, McCann London took the series' founding fantasy, that a fan could do the manager's job better, and made it…
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2022A British Original
Launched in October 2022 as British Airways' first work with Uncommon Creative Studio, it took travel's dullest box-ticking question, “What is the…
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2021Long Live the Prince
On 18 May 2021, fifteen years after Kiyan Prince was stabbed at the gates of his north London school while trying to break up a fight, the former…
2010s
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2018Nothing Beats a Londoner
A three-minute film in which 258 young Londoners try to outdo one another's sporting feats across Dalston, Peckham and Brixton, with Mo Farah, Harry…
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2018FCK ("We're Sorry")
The best corporate apology ever printed.
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2017Trash Isles
A garbage patch that applied to become a country.
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2015Shoplifters
An online film made entirely from real CCTV footage of shoplifters at Harvey Nichols' Knightsbridge store.
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2015LifePaint
A car maker that built something for the people outside its cars.
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2014Monty the Penguin
The peak of the modern Christmas-ad genre John Lewis invented.
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2014Most Shocking Second a Day
A 90-second film assembled from one-second clips, borrowing the “second a day” video-diary format then popular online.
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2013The Pony
On a windswept Shetland hillside a stocky little pony called Socks moonwalks and tosses his mane to Fleetwood Mac's “Everywhere”.
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2013Magic of Flying (#lookup)
A billboard that looked up.
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2013Sorry, I Spent It On Myself
For Christmas 2013 the luxury department store Harvey Nichols put a real range of deliberately cheap presents on sale: the Sorry, I Spent It On…
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2012Meet the Superhumans
The film that changed how disability is shown on screen.
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2010Embrace Life
A father sits in his living room pretending to drive while his wife and daughter watch.
2000s
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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…
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2009COW ("Only Stwpd Cowz Txt N Drive")
Cassie, a 17-year-old driver, sends a text at the wheel, drifts into oncoming traffic and causes a three-car crash on the outskirts of Tredegar that…
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2009Dance (Life's for Sharing)
On the morning of 15 January 2009, music came over the loudspeakers at London's Liverpool Street station, a single commuter started to dance, and…
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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…
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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.
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2005noitulovE
Three drinkers raise their pints — and time reverses.
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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…
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2004Grrr ("Hate Something, Change Something")
A diesel-engine ad built on hate.
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2004Lightbulb
The Economist made its name in outdoor with witty copy; this poster dropped the words altogether.
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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…
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Small but tough. Polo.Volkswagen2003
Cops
A squad of American cops is pinned down in a street shoot-out, and every one of them has picked the same cover: not their own patrol car but a…
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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…
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Beach, Bar, PoolClub 18-302002
Beach, Bar, Pool
Three crowded, sun-drenched holiday scenes, on a beach, at a bar and around a pool, look like ordinary package-tour snapshots.
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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
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1999Surfer
A beer's pour time turned into myth.
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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…
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New Labour, New DangerThe Conservative Party (UK)1996
New Labour, New Danger ("Demon Eyes")
Demonic red eyes peer through a gap in red curtains above the line "New Labour, New Danger".
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Hello Boys.Wonderbra (Playtex)1994
Hello Boys
The poster that proved outdoor could out-punch television on a fraction of the budget.
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1993Tested for the Unexpected
A tyre ad as art film.
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1992Orange Man ("You Know When You've Been Tango'd")
The anti-ad that out-punched Coca-Cola's budgets.
1980s
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1989Face
Thousands of schoolchildren in coloured costumes, filmed from helicopters over Utah, assemble into a winking eye, an ear, lips — and finally a…
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"I never read The Economist." Management trainee. Aged 42.The Economist1988
"I never read The Economist." Management trainee. Aged 42.
Nine words that flatter the reader by threatening them.
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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.
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1986Don't Die of Ignorance ("Monolith")
The most consequential public-health advertising Britain has produced.
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1985Launderette
The ad that relaunched a fading product as the most desired object in Britain.
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1983J.R. Hartley ("Fly Fishing")
An elderly man trudges from bookshop to bookshop seeking a copy of "Fly Fishing by J.R.
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It also sticks handles to teapots.Araldite1983
It Also Sticks Handles to Teapots
The ultimate product demonstration: a real yellow Ford Cortina glued to a billboard on London's Cromwell Road, with the understated line "It also…
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(No copy — a slash in purple silk, plus the government health warning.)Silk Cut (Gallaher)1983
Silk Cut (the purple silk)
Advertising stripped to a pure visual pun.
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Reassuringly expensive.Stella Artois1982
Reassuringly Expensive
Most brands hide a premium price; Stella Artois made it the selling point.
1970s
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Labour isn't working. Britain's better off with the Conservatives.The Conservative Party (UK)1978
Labour Isn't Working
The poster that brought modern advertising techniques to British politics.
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Surreal Gold Pack PostersBenson & Hedges (Gallaher)1977
Surreal Gold Pack Posters
Posters with no people, no slogan and almost no words, just a gold pack hidden inside a baffling picture.
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1974Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach
A pseudo-scientific absurdity that ran for three decades.
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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…
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1973The Bike Ride ("Boy on the Bike")
Forty-seven seconds of manufactured nostalgia so potent it rewired Britain's memory.
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Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?Health Education Council (UK)1970
Pregnant Man ("Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?")
A man, hand resting on a heavily pregnant belly, and a question aimed squarely at his half of the population.
1950s
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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:…
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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…
1940s
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1942Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
Britain's wartime railways were needed for troops and supplies, and coal and petrol were needed for the war effort, so the public had to be…
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1941Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases
In October 1941 the Ministry of Health opened an autumn campaign against colds and flu built on one rhyming line: "Coughs and sneezes spread…
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1941Join the ATS ("The Blonde Bombshell")
Abram Games, then a corporal in the Royal Engineers, set out in 1941 to fix the dowdy image of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch…
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Careless talk costs livesMinistry of Information (UK)1940
Careless Talk Costs Lives
When the Ministry of Information set out to stop wartime gossip, the Punch cartoonist Cyril Kenneth Bird, who signed himself Fougasse, convinced…
1930s
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1939Dig for Victory
Before the Second World War Britain imported around 55 million tons of food a year, and German U-boats went straight for the merchant ships carrying…
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1939Keep Calm and Carry On
One of Britain's best-known posters was barely seen in the war it was made for.
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1935The Guinness Toucan ("Just think what Toucan do")
The bird that made a stout lovable.
1910s
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Soaring to Success! Daily Herald – the Early BirdDaily Herald1919
Soaring to Success! Daily Herald – the Early Bird
Britain's landmark modernist poster began life as an orphan.
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1915Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?
A British recruitment poster that sells enlistment by staging a moment from the future.
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1915Women of Britain Say – ‘Go!’
Instead of addressing men, this 1915 recruitment poster recruits the people closest to them to do the persuading.
1890s
1880s
About Great British Ads
The best British adverts of all time, from Hovis's "Boy on the Bike" and the Smash Martians to Guinness, Honda's "Cog" and the John Lewis Christmas ads. British advertising earned an international reputation for wit, understatement and film-making craft, and several leading film directors started out making British commercials.
This collection covers work made by British agencies for the British market, on television, in print and on the street.