Technique
Demonstration
Ads that prove a claim by showing the product in action, often with a test, a torture test or a striking piece of visual proof.
2020s
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2025Act Like You Know
The product really built the logo, website and social posts for the actor's eyewear line, so the claim is shown rather than asserted.
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2025Vaseline Verified
Playful lab-style videos show which hacks actually work, awarding a seal to the proven ones and debunking the rest.
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2024All the Ads
Proves a delivery app can bring almost anything to your door by promising one winner a prize from every commercial in the game.
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2023R.I.P. Leon
Shows a single iPhone feature, unsending a text, in action as a panicked lizard-sitter retracts his bad news once Leon flips back over.
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2020Smaht Pahk
A Sonata slips into a tight parallel-parking space at the click of a button, showing the remote parking feature in action.
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2020Moldy Whopper
Time-lapse photographs of a Whopper rotting over 35 days prove the claim that it no longer contains artificial preservatives.
2010s
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2018Alexa Loses Her Voice
By imagining the assistant gone, it proves its usefulness indirectly, with each cameo standing in for a routine request it normally handles.
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2016The Swedish Number
Proves the country's openness and curiosity by handing strangers a direct line to the evidence and accepting whoever answers.
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2015High School Girl?
Running the film in reverse to strip away wigs, make-up and uniforms reveals that every schoolgirl is male, so the twist itself proves what the make-up can do.
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2015Shot on iPhone ("World Gallery")
Billboards show nothing but photographs taken by ordinary users, so the camera's quality is proved by what it shot.
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2015The Safety Truck
Shows what the brand's outdoor screens are for by mounting them on a truck's back as a live view through it.
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2014Experience the Power of a Bookbook
The catalogue's plain virtues are shown off as tech features, from an eternal battery and no load times to tactile technology.
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2014Inglorious Fruits & Vegetables
Serves soup and juice made from the ugly produce in store, so shoppers can taste that it is just as good.
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2013Chicken
Handlers sway live chickens whose heads stay perfectly still, a visual analogy that makes invisible suspension engineering easy to grasp.
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2013Reunion
Search, flight details and weather features are shown working entirely inside the story, each search moving the reunion forward.
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2013The Epic Split
Two reversing trucks hold a steady line while a man does the splits between them in one unbroken shot, proving the steering's precision.
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2013People for Smarter Cities
Showing smarter-city thinking in action at pavement level makes an abstract corporate idea tangible rather than merely describing it.
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A billboard that turns air into clean drinking water is ingenuity in action.UTEC (University of Engineering and Technology)2013
The Billboard That Makes Water
Instead of claiming that engineering changes lives, the university builds a billboard that turns humid air into drinking water and lets people see it work.
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2012A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Square ("Push to Add Drama")
Proves the channel's promise of drama by making it physically happen in a sleepy town square.
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2012The Invisible Drive
Makes zero tailpipe emissions literal by covering a car in LED mats fed by a camera, so it appears to vanish.
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2012Red Bull Stratos
Makes the 'gives you wings' slogan literal with a real edge-of-space jump, so the event itself is the proof rather than an ad about it.
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2010Selinah
Ninety days of real footage, with no visual effects, prove that antiretroviral treatment can bring a patient back from the brink.
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2010Parisian Love
Keeps the search box on screen throughout, so the product in use is both the storyteller and the proof of how it helps at each step of life.
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2010A Hunter Shoots a Bear
The hunter grabs correction tape from the neighbouring banner and whites out a word in the video's title, using the product on the interface itself.
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2010The Wilderness Downtown
Choreographed browser windows, maps and filmed footage show off what HTML5 can do in Chrome, making the browser itself the medium.
2000s
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2009ZooZoos
Each mini-story quietly shows one mobile service in use, from backing up a phonebook to group texting.
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2009Carousel
A frozen shootout explored in one continuous, looping tracking shot shows off cinematic proportions, so the craft itself demonstrates the widescreen television.
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2009The Trillion Dollar Campaign
Ads printed on worthless trillion-dollar notes are themselves physical evidence of the economic collapse the newspaper reports.
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2008Awareness Test ("Moonwalking Bear")
The test proves its claim on each viewer in real time: it is easy to miss something you are not looking for, such as a cyclist.
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2006Will It Blend?
The founder blends marbles, a rotisserie chicken and even an iPhone, torture tests that prove the blender's real power on camera.
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2005Balls (and "Paint")
Releases a flood of brightly coloured balls down real San Francisco hills, with no CGI, to make the television's colour claim visible at heroic scale.
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2005Crossbar ("Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold")
Styled as a homemade product test, the clip shows the player lace up new boots and strike the crossbar four times without the ball touching the ground.
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ImagineLEGO2005
Imagine (Periscope)
Leaving the reader to supply the submarine lets them experience the very imaginative benefit the bricks are selling.
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2003Cog
Accord parts topple and roll into each other in a flawless real-world chain reaction ending with the car, so the ad's own precision proves things just work.
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Small but tough. Polo.Volkswagen2003
Cops
The cops' choice of the small car over their own patrol car as cover shows, rather than argues, that the Polo is tough.
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2002Bus
Villagers clinging to every side of the lurching bus never fall off, an exaggerated visual proof of the adhesive's holding power.
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2002Metamorfosis
Passes the scent's pull from one creature or person to the next in a wordless chain reaction, visually proving the new formula lasts.
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2001BMW Films: The Hire
The cars are embedded in the action rather than pitched, so each drama shows what they can do on the road.
1990s
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1999Bugger
The farmer keeps underestimating the Hilux as it knocks down a fence, tips a tractor and sends a stump flying, comically showing off its power.
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1993Tested for the Unexpected
Sets a surreal gauntlet of hazards, from an evil magician to cascading marbles and a soap-scrubbed road, turning the tyre test into an art film.
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1991Glug Glug
A toy car filled with the fuel scorches across a bedroom and smashes through the wall, dramatising performance instead of merely claiming it.
1980s
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1987Hitler
Viewers are led by true facts to a false impression, proving on screen that you can lie while telling only the truth.
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1987This Is Your Brain on Drugs ("Fried Egg")
Borrows the structure of a product demonstration, holding up an egg, a pan and the result, so the metaphor proves itself on screen.
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1985Launderette
A man strips to his boxers to wash his jeans in a launderette, a scandalous scene that quietly shows off shrink-to-fit denim.
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It also sticks handles to teapots.Araldite1983
It Also Sticks Handles to Teapots
A real car glued to a billboard proves the adhesive's strength in public, far more vividly than any claim could.
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1981Myriam ("Le 2 septembre, j'enlève le haut")
Posters that change exactly on the promised dates prove publicly that the billboard company keeps its posting promises.
1970s
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1977Monks ("Brother Dominic")
Shows the machine turning out hundreds of copies of a manuscript in the time it takes to step through a doorway and back.
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1975The Pepsi Challenge
Lets Coke drinkers run a blind taste test on camera, so the audience sees the proof for themselves.
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1974Tough Under Fire
A marksman fires a rifle bullet clean through a padlock in slow motion, and the lock stays shut, proving the claim in a single shot.
1960s
1950s
1880s
Demonstration: how it works
Demonstration is one of advertising's oldest techniques: instead of claiming that a product is tough, fast, safe or effective, show it. The great demonstration ads turn a product test into theatre, so the proof is also the entertainment.
How to spot it
- A test, an experiment or a dramatic scenario with a visible result.
- The product is the hero of the action, not a prop in the background.
- The claim can be seen rather than taken on trust.
Why it works
Seeing is believing: a demonstration is harder to dismiss than an assertion, and a memorable one becomes shorthand for the product's benefit. The examples below range from torture tests on live television to billboards that prove their point in public.