Advertisement Examples That Changed How Brands Grow

The best advertisement examples are not the ones that win awards. They are the ones that shifted market position, pulled new audiences into the brand, and held that ground long enough to compound. Most roundups of great ads celebrate craft. This one is more interested in what the work actually did commercially, and what you can learn from it when you are trying to build something that lasts.

Advertising works in different ways depending on where a brand sits in the market, what problem it is trying to solve, and how its audience makes decisions. The examples that follow are not here to be admired. They are here to be interrogated.

Why Most Advertisement Examples Lists Miss the Point

I spent a morning early in my career sitting in a brainstorm for Guinness. The founder of the agency had to leave for a client meeting partway through and handed me the whiteboard pen. My internal reaction was something close to panic. Guinness had decades of iconic advertising behind it. The pressure in that room was not just creative, it was historical. You do not scribble mediocre ideas on a whiteboard when the brief has that kind of weight.

What I noticed in that session, and in hundreds of similar rooms since, is that people reach for references the wrong way. They cite famous ads to justify aesthetic choices rather than strategic ones. “We want something like the Guinness surfer” is not a strategy. It is a mood board. The surfer ad worked because it dramatised the product truth of waiting in a way that made the wait feel like desire. Strip that insight out and you have a wave and a horse and nothing else.

If you are thinking about go-to-market strategy more broadly, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers how advertising fits into a wider commercial framework, from audience definition through to measurement.

The examples in this article are chosen because they illustrate specific strategic principles. Some are famous. Some are not. All of them have something to teach beyond the surface.

Advertisements That Built Brand Position Over Time

Long-term brand building is the hardest thing to defend in a marketing budget conversation. The results are real but they are slow, and they do not show up cleanly in a dashboard. I have sat in enough board rooms to know that the pressure to cut brand spend in favour of performance channels is almost constant, and almost always short-sighted.

The campaigns that have built durable brand position share a common structure. They find something true about the audience, something the audience already feels but has not heard said back to them clearly, and they repeat it with discipline across years, not quarters.

Nike and the athlete identity

Nike’s advertising from the 1980s onward is the most studied example of identity-based brand building in consumer marketing. The strategic insight was not “people like sport.” It was “people who are not professional athletes want to see themselves as athletes.” That distinction sounds small. It is enormous. By positioning the brand around a self-image rather than a product category, Nike made its advertising relevant to people who had never run a race and never would. The product was the proof point. The ad was the permission slip.

What makes this commercially instructive is not the executional quality, though that was exceptional. It is the consistency of the underlying idea across decades and across wildly different creative executions. The tone changed. The talent changed. The idea did not.

Apple and the outsider narrative

The 1984 Macintosh ad and the “Think Different” campaign a decade later are often cited together as examples of great advertising. They are also examples of the same strategic move: Apple positioned itself against conformity at a time when conformity was the dominant culture in computing. The audience was not just buying a computer. They were making a statement about who they were.

This is a positioning play as much as an advertising play. The advertising made the positioning legible to a mass audience. You cannot separate the two. BCG’s work on brand strategy and go-to-market alignment makes the case that brand and commercial strategy need to be developed together, not in sequence. Apple is probably the cleanest real-world example of what that looks like when it works.

Dove and the audience truth

Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, which launched in the early 2000s, is worth examining not because it was emotionally powerful, though it was, but because it identified a genuine gap between what the beauty industry was saying and what the audience actually felt. The insight was not invented in a creative brief. It came from research that showed a significant disconnect between how women saw themselves and how advertising portrayed them.

The commercial result was category disruption. Dove moved from being a functional soap brand to owning a values-based position that competitors could not easily copy without looking cynical. That is what a good audience insight does when it is translated into advertising with discipline.

Advertisements That Created Demand Rather Than Captured It

Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel performance. It took me longer than I would like to admit to recognise that a lot of what performance channels were being credited for was going to happen anyway. Someone who was already in the market, already searching, already close to a decision, was going to buy. The performance channel just happened to be the last thing they touched before they did.

The harder, more valuable work is reaching people who are not yet in the market and making them want to be. It is the difference between a clothes shop that converts well when customers walk in, and one that makes people want to walk in in the first place. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who was never in the store. Getting them through the door is the advertising job. Converting them is operations.

Understanding market penetration as a growth lever is useful context here. Penetration-led growth requires advertising that reaches light buyers and non-buyers, not just people already in the consideration set.

Old Spice and the category reset

By the late 2000s, Old Spice was a declining brand associated with an older generation. The “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign did not just revive the brand. It repositioned the entire product category for a new audience. The creative was absurdist and funny, but the strategic decision underneath it was serious: stop talking to existing customers and start talking to people who had never considered the brand.

The campaign is a textbook example of demand creation rather than demand capture. It did not target people already searching for men’s body wash. It created a cultural moment that made a new audience curious. The commercial results followed.

Airbnb and the belonging idea

Airbnb’s early advertising had to do something structurally difficult: convince people to stay in a stranger’s home. The rational case was price. But price alone does not overcome the kind of behavioural resistance that comes with a genuinely new idea. The emotional case, built around belonging and authentic local experience, was what moved the needle with early adopters. It created a category of traveller who identified with the idea before they had ever booked a trip.

This is demand creation in its purest form. There was no existing search intent for “stay in a stranger’s home.” The advertising had to manufacture the desire before the product could fulfil it. Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder than it used to touches on exactly this challenge: in crowded markets, the advertising work required to create new demand is more complex and more expensive than it was a decade ago.

B2B Advertisement Examples That Actually Work

B2B advertising has a reputation for being dull, and in most cases that reputation is earned. The assumption is that business buyers are rational and therefore advertising should be rational. That is a category error. Business buyers are human. They have careers to protect, colleagues to convince, and bosses to satisfy. The emotional stakes in a B2B purchase are often higher than in a consumer one, not lower.

The B2B campaigns that have worked commercially tend to do one of two things well: they either make a complex value proposition simple and memorable, or they address the emotional reality of the buying decision rather than pretending it does not exist.

IBM and “Nobody ever got fired”

The phrase “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” was never a formal advertising campaign. It was a market truth that IBM’s advertising reinforced consistently enough that it became a cultural shorthand. The insight was that B2B technology buyers were not just evaluating products. They were managing personal risk. IBM understood that and built its positioning around safety and credibility rather than features and price.

The lesson is not that you should promise safety. It is that you should understand what your buyer is actually afraid of, and address that directly. Feature lists do not do this. Good B2B advertising does.

Salesforce and the category creation playbook

Salesforce’s early advertising positioned the product against “software” as a concept, with the famous “No Software” campaign. This was not a product comparison. It was a category creation move. By defining what they were against rather than what they were selling, Salesforce made the category itself the enemy and positioned cloud CRM as the obvious alternative.

I have seen this approach work at much smaller scale in agency pitches. The most effective new business presentations I ran were not the ones where we explained what we did better than the competition. They were the ones where we reframed what the client should be buying and why the old way of buying it was the problem.

For brands operating in complex B2B markets, Forrester’s analysis of go-to-market challenges in specialist sectors is worth reading. The advertising challenges in highly regulated or technical categories are genuinely different, and the solutions require more strategic precision than most creative briefs allow for.

Digital Advertisement Examples Worth Studying

Digital advertising has produced a lot of noise and a smaller amount of genuinely instructive work. The format has changed the distribution mechanism but not the underlying logic. Good digital advertising still needs a clear audience, a relevant message, and enough creative quality to stop someone mid-scroll.

What digital has changed is the feedback loop. You can see what is working faster than in any previous era of advertising. The risk is that speed of feedback encourages optimisation of the wrong things. Click-through rate is not business outcome. Conversion rate on a landing page is not brand equity. The metrics are useful but they are not the point.

Dollar Shave Club and the launch video

The Dollar Shave Club launch video from 2012 is probably the most studied example of content-as-advertising in the direct-to-consumer era. It worked for reasons that are easy to list but hard to replicate: a clear product truth, a strong and specific point of view, a founder willing to be the face of the brand, and a distribution moment that matched the content to where the audience was spending time.

What is less often discussed is what it did not do. It did not try to be all things. It made one argument clearly and let the product prove the rest. That discipline is rarer than it looks.

Creator-led campaigns in social commerce

The shift toward creator-led advertising is one of the more significant structural changes in digital marketing over the past five years. The best examples work because the creator has genuine credibility with the audience and the product fits naturally into their content. When those conditions are met, the advertising does not feel like advertising, which is both its strength and the reason it is difficult to scale.

Later’s work on go-to-market strategies with creators covers how brands can build creator campaigns that convert rather than just generate reach. The distinction matters. Reach without commercial intent is expensive content production, not advertising.

I managed a significant volume of paid social spend across multiple verticals at iProspect during a period when creator content was beginning to outperform traditional creative in certain categories. The pattern was consistent: where the creator had built genuine trust with their audience around a specific topic, and where the product was genuinely relevant to that topic, performance was strong. Where brands tried to force fit products into creator content that did not belong there, the results were poor and sometimes damaging to both parties.

What Separates Good Advertisement Examples From Great Ones

I spent several years judging the Effie Awards, which are the closest thing marketing has to a commercially rigorous assessment of advertising effectiveness. The Effies require entrants to demonstrate business results, not just creative quality. What that process taught me is that the gap between good advertising and great advertising is almost never about production values or creative originality. It is almost always about strategic clarity.

The entries that consistently performed best shared a small number of characteristics. They had a precise audience definition. They had a clear and differentiated message for that audience. They were executed with consistency over a long enough period to build memory. And they had a measurement framework that connected advertising activity to business outcome rather than to proxy metrics.

That last point is worth expanding. The measurement of advertising effectiveness is genuinely hard, and the industry has a long history of measuring what is easy rather than what is important. Understanding how feedback loops work in growth contexts is relevant here. The brands that build durable advertising effectiveness tend to have better feedback loops between their commercial data and their creative decisions, not just better creative.

The audience specificity principle

Every example in this article, from Nike to Dollar Shave Club to Dove, was built on a specific and accurate understanding of a specific audience. Not a demographic. Not a persona built in a workshop. An actual human truth about how a group of people think and feel about something relevant to the product.

The most common failure mode I see in advertising briefs is audience definition that is too broad to be useful. “Adults 25 to 54 with an interest in health and wellness” is not an audience. It is a targeting parameter. The advertising that works is built for a person, not a parameter.

The consistency principle

Brand advertising builds memory through repetition. Not repetition of the same execution, but repetition of the same underlying idea expressed in ways that stay fresh without losing coherence. The campaigns that have built the most durable brand equity have done this over years. The pressure to refresh campaigns too frequently, which is often driven by internal boredom rather than audience fatigue, is one of the most reliable ways to undermine advertising investment.

I have had this conversation more times than I can count. The marketing team is tired of the campaign. The audience has barely registered it. Those are not the same problem.

How to Apply These Examples to Your Own Advertising

The risk with any list of advertisement examples is that it becomes a reference library for aesthetic borrowing rather than strategic thinking. “Let’s do something like the Old Spice campaign” is not a brief. It is a shortcut that usually leads somewhere mediocre.

The right way to use examples is to work backwards from the strategic principle to your own situation. Old Spice worked because it reached a new audience with a message that was genuinely surprising and relevant to them. The question for your brand is not “how do we make something funny and absurdist?” It is “who is the audience we are not currently reaching, and what would genuinely surprise and engage them?”

The same applies to B2B. IBM’s “nobody ever got fired” principle is not about safety messaging. It is about understanding the emotional reality of your buyer’s decision. The question is not “how do we position ourselves as safe?” It is “what is our buyer actually afraid of, and can we address that honestly?”

For brands at an earlier stage of go-to-market development, BCG’s framework for planning successful product launches is useful for thinking about how advertising fits into a broader commercial strategy rather than sitting outside it.

The advertising decisions that matter most are not made in the creative brief. They are made before it: in the audience definition, the positioning work, the channel strategy, and the measurement framework. Get those right and the creative has a fighting chance. Get them wrong and no amount of production quality will save the work.

If you are working through how advertising connects to your wider commercial strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture, from market entry through to scaling and measurement.

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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