Ad Examples That Changed How I Think About Creative

Ad examples are most useful not as inspiration boards but as evidence. The best ones reveal something about how persuasion works, why certain creative decisions outperform others, and what separates campaigns that shift behaviour from those that simply fill space. If you study them as a strategist rather than a spectator, they teach you more than any framework will.

This is not a roundup of award winners. It is a selection of campaigns and creative approaches that hold up under commercial scrutiny, with commentary on what they actually did and why it mattered.

If you want to understand why some campaigns generate long-term commercial return while others disappear without trace, the analysis belongs in a broader conversation about how go-to-market strategy shapes creative decisions. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial architecture that sits behind effective advertising, from positioning to channel selection to audience targeting.

What Makes an Ad Example Worth Studying?

I have sat in a lot of creative reviews over the years. Early in my career I was impressed by ads that were clever, beautifully shot, or emotionally arresting. I still appreciate those things. But I learned, slowly and sometimes expensively, that the question worth asking is not “is this good?” but “did it work, and why?”

When I was judging at the Effie Awards, the submissions that stood out were the ones where the team could trace a clear line from strategy to creative to measurable outcome. Not a vague claim of brand uplift, but evidence that the campaign reached the right people, changed something in how they thought or behaved, and contributed to commercial results. Many entries could not do that. They were beautiful, often genuinely moving, but disconnected from any honest account of commercial performance.

That experience shaped how I look at ad examples now. I am less interested in whether an ad won a Lion and more interested in whether it solved a real business problem. Those two things sometimes overlap. Often they do not.

Guinness: Patience as a Brand Positioning

My first week at Cybercom, the founder handed me a whiteboard pen mid-brainstorm for a Guinness brief and walked out to a client meeting. I remember thinking, very clearly, that this was going to be difficult. It was. But it also put me in a room where the Guinness brand was being dissected at a strategic level, and that shaped how I think about the brand to this day.

The “Surfer” ad, created by AMV BBDO, is one of the most studied pieces of commercial creative in British advertising history. It is easy to reduce it to the tagline: “Good things come to those who wait.” But the creative decision that made it work was the decision to make the product’s inconvenience its central selling point. Guinness takes longer to pour than any other draught beer. That is, by any rational measure, a disadvantage. The campaign converted it into a virtue, and in doing so, repositioned patience as aspiration rather than frustration.

What this example teaches is not that you should make a dramatic TV ad. It is that positioning requires honesty about what your product actually is, including the parts that could be seen as weaknesses. The brands that try to hide their constraints usually produce advertising that feels evasive. The ones that lean into them, with confidence and craft, tend to produce work that resonates.

This is harder than it sounds. It requires a client willing to commit to a strategic truth rather than a comfortable claim. And it requires an agency willing to push that through rather than retreat to safer creative territory.

Apple “1984”: When Context Is the Creative

Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl commercial is cited so often it risks becoming a cliché. But it deserves examination not for its cinematic ambition, which was considerable, but for the strategic decision embedded in its placement.

The ad ran once, during the Super Bowl, and was never broadcast again as a paid placement. That scarcity was the strategy. In a media environment where ads were expected to repeat, Apple created something designed to be talked about rather than seen repeatedly. The commercial became news. The coverage it generated was worth multiples of the airtime cost.

What this reveals is that the media decision and the creative decision are not separate. The choice of where and how an ad runs shapes what it means. A campaign that would be ignored on a Tuesday afternoon can become a cultural event if the context is right. Most advertisers treat media and creative as parallel workstreams. The best campaigns treat them as a single problem.

The commercial also positioned Apple against IBM with a clarity that most competitive advertising never achieves. It did not name the competitor. It did not list product specifications. It drew a stark symbolic contrast and trusted the audience to understand it. That kind of confidence in the audience is rare, and it is one of the things that separates genuinely effective creative from the kind that explains itself to death.

Nike “Just Do It”: The Campaign That Kept Working

When I think about what creative consistency actually looks like at scale, Nike is the example I come back to most. “Just Do It” launched in 1988 and has remained the brand’s central creative platform for nearly four decades. That longevity is not accidental. It reflects a strategic decision to treat the tagline as infrastructure rather than a campaign asset.

The phrase is flexible enough to carry almost any execution, from a marathon runner in the rain to a Colin Kaepernick portrait. The emotional register shifts. The cultural context shifts. The visual language shifts. But the underlying idea, that the barrier between wanting to do something and doing it is always internal, remains constant.

This is what most brands get wrong about creative consistency. They confuse it with repetition. Repeating the same ad is not consistency. It is laziness. Consistency means returning to the same strategic territory through different creative executions, so that each new piece of work adds to a body of meaning rather than starting from scratch.

The commercial case for this approach is significant. Brand memory builds through repeated exposure to consistent signals. When Nike runs a new campaign, it is not starting from zero. It is drawing on decades of accumulated brand equity. That is a compounding advantage that most marketing teams underestimate because it is hard to attribute in a dashboard.

Dove “Real Beauty”: Reaching Beyond the Existing Audience

The Dove “Real Beauty” campaign, which launched in 2004, is interesting for a reason that does not get discussed enough. It did not just reframe the product. It expanded the audience.

Before the campaign, Dove was a functional soap brand competing on product attributes in a crowded category. The strategic shift was to move the conversation from product performance to cultural values, specifically the way the beauty industry defined what women should look like. That shift allowed Dove to speak to a far wider group of women than the brand had previously reached.

I spent a significant part of my career overvaluing lower-funnel performance activity. I was not alone in this. The industry went through a period where performance marketing was treated as the answer to almost every commercial problem. What I came to understand, and what the Dove example illustrates clearly, is that capturing existing demand is not the same as creating new demand. If you only speak to people who are already considering your category, you are competing for a fixed pool. Growth requires reaching people who were not yet thinking about you at all.

Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign reached women who had tuned out conventional beauty advertising. It gave them a reason to pay attention. That is not a soft brand metric. That is a growth strategy. BCG’s work on commercial transformation makes a similar point about how growth-oriented organisations think differently about who they are trying to reach, not just how efficiently they convert the people already in the funnel.

Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”: Reframing the Audience

Old Spice had a brand perception problem. It was seen as a product for older men. The challenge was not just to attract younger buyers but to do it without alienating the existing customer base or looking like a brand desperately chasing relevance.

The creative solution was elegant in its indirection. The ads were aimed at women, specifically women who buy or influence the purchase of men’s grooming products. The protagonist spoke directly to camera, addressing “the ladies,” while the humour and absurdist energy made the campaign shareable among men who would never have engaged with a straightforward grooming ad.

This is a good example of understanding that the person who sees your ad and the person who buys your product are not always the same person. Most advertising briefs are written as though the target audience is a single, clearly defined individual. In practice, purchase decisions are often influenced by people who are not the end user. The Old Spice campaign understood that and built the creative around it.

The campaign also worked because it did not take itself seriously. Old Spice was not a prestige brand. Pretending otherwise would have been unconvincing. The self-aware humour was not just a stylistic choice. It was a strategic acknowledgment of where the brand sat in the market, and it turned that position into an asset.

Airbnb “Belong Anywhere”: Selling a Behaviour, Not a Product

Airbnb’s early brand advertising is instructive because the company was not selling accommodation. It was selling a fundamentally different relationship with travel and with strangers. The product required a significant behaviour change from its audience. You had to trust a stranger enough to sleep in their home, or to let strangers sleep in yours.

The “Belong Anywhere” platform addressed this directly, not by explaining how the platform works or listing safety features, but by reframing what travel could feel like. The emotional territory was belonging rather than booking. That distinction matters because the functional barrier to using Airbnb was not understanding the product. It was trust. The advertising worked on the trust problem, not the awareness problem.

This is something I have seen go wrong repeatedly with challenger brands. They spend their advertising budget explaining what they do, when the real barrier is getting people to believe in the experience. If your category involves significant behaviour change, the creative brief needs to address the psychological barrier, not just the awareness gap. Forrester’s thinking on intelligent growth points to a similar tension: growth strategies that focus only on acquisition often underestimate the role of trust-building in converting new audiences.

Volkswagen “Think Small”: The Ad That Invented a Playbook

If you want to trace the lineage of a particular style of advertising, the kind that is honest, self-deprecating, and confident enough to highlight its own limitations, it runs through the Volkswagen “Think Small” campaign from 1959.

American car advertising in that era was about size, power, and aspiration. Volkswagen was selling a small, underpowered car into a market that had been conditioned to want the opposite. The DDB creative team did not try to compete on those terms. They acknowledged the car’s smallness directly, with a visual layout that left most of the page white and copy that was frank about what the car was and was not.

The campaign worked because it treated the audience as intelligent. It did not oversell. It did not pretend. It made a clear, honest case for why a small, economical car was the right choice for a certain kind of buyer, and it trusted that buyer to reach their own conclusion.

This is still the hardest thing to get right in advertising. Clients often want to claim more than the product can honestly support. Agencies often want to produce work that impresses other agencies. The audience, meanwhile, has a very finely tuned detector for inauthenticity. The campaigns that cut through are usually the ones willing to say something true, even if the truth is less flattering than the brand would like.

John Lewis Christmas: What Emotional Advertising Actually Requires

The John Lewis Christmas campaigns have become a case study in emotional advertising, and they are worth examining carefully because they are frequently misunderstood.

The assumption is that the campaigns work because they are emotional. That is not quite right. Plenty of advertising is emotional without being effective. The John Lewis campaigns work because the emotion is always connected to a specific brand idea: thoughtfulness in gift-giving. The films are not just sad or heartwarming in a generic sense. They are specifically about the care that goes into choosing a gift for someone you love. That connection to the product and the brand purpose is what makes the sentiment commercially useful rather than merely decorative.

There is also a consistency point here. The campaigns have run for long enough that the audience now brings anticipation to them. The cultural moment of the John Lewis Christmas ad has become part of the brand’s value. That is not something you can buy with a single campaign, however well executed. It is the result of sustained strategic commitment over many years.

I have worked with clients who wanted the emotional resonance of campaigns like this without the patience to build it. They wanted the result of ten years of brand investment delivered in a single campaign. That is not how brand equity works. Semrush’s analysis of growth examples makes a related point: the tactics that appear to generate overnight success almost always have years of brand and audience development behind them.

What These Examples Have in Common

Looking across these campaigns, a few patterns emerge that are worth naming explicitly.

First, every one of them starts from a clear strategic position. Not a vague brand purpose statement, but a specific answer to the question: what do we want this audience to think, feel, or do differently? The creative follows from that answer. When campaigns fail, it is usually because this question was never answered clearly, or because the creative team was briefed without access to the strategic thinking.

Second, none of them are trying to reach everyone. They have a specific audience in mind, and they are willing to be irrelevant to people outside that audience. This sounds obvious but it is routinely violated in practice, usually because of internal pressure to broaden the appeal and avoid alienating any potential customer. The result of trying to speak to everyone is almost always creative that speaks to no one particularly well.

Third, they are all honest about something. The Guinness ad is honest about the pour time. The VW ad is honest about the car’s size. The Old Spice ad is honest about where the brand sits in the market. Honesty in advertising is not a moral position. It is a strategic one. Audiences are better at detecting inauthenticity than most marketers give them credit for, and the cost of that detection is not just a failed ad. It is erosion of brand trust. Vidyard’s research on pipeline and revenue points to trust as a central factor in whether go-to-market activity converts, particularly in longer sales cycles where brand perception compounds over time.

Fourth, the best of them are designed for reach, not just relevance. They are built to travel beyond the existing audience, to reach people who were not already in the market. This is where a lot of digital advertising falls short. Highly targeted campaigns are efficient at reaching people who are already considering a purchase. They are less good at creating the kind of broad mental availability that drives growth over time. BCG’s go-to-market research in financial services found that understanding the evolving needs of populations, not just current customers, was a consistent differentiator for growing organisations.

How to Use Ad Examples Without Copying Them

The risk with studying great advertising is that teams start trying to replicate the surface features rather than the strategic logic. They want to make a heartwarming Christmas film because John Lewis did it. They want to use self-deprecating humour because VW and Old Spice did it. The form without the thinking is just pastiche.

The more useful exercise is to ask, for each example, what strategic problem was being solved? What did the team know about their audience that shaped the creative decision? What were they willing to sacrifice, in terms of broad appeal or conventional category codes, to make the work land?

Those questions, applied to your own brief, are more valuable than any creative reference. The goal is not to produce work that looks like the examples above. It is to produce work that is as strategically grounded as they are, in a form that is right for your audience, your category, and your moment.

Creator-led formats are increasingly part of this conversation. Later’s work on creator-led go-to-market campaigns shows that the principles of reach, authenticity, and audience specificity apply just as much in influencer and social formats as they do in broadcast. The channel changes. The strategic logic does not.

And for teams working in agile environments, where campaigns are iterated quickly and briefs change frequently, the discipline of maintaining strategic clarity under pressure is genuinely difficult. Forrester’s thinking on agile scaling is a useful reference point for how organisations maintain quality and coherence when moving fast.

If you are building a campaign brief right now, or reviewing creative that is not quite landing, the frameworks and thinking behind effective go-to-market strategy are worth revisiting. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial and strategic foundations that make advertising decisions more defensible and more effective.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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