Best Advertisements Ever Made: What They Got Right

The best advertisements ever made share one quality that has nothing to do with production budgets or award ceremonies: they changed how people felt about a brand, and that feeling translated into commercial results. Not all of them were loved at the time. Several were considered risky. A few were almost killed before they ran.

What separates them from the thousands of campaigns that came and went in the same era is that they understood something true about the audience, said it in a way that landed, and trusted the creative work to do the job. That sounds simple. It almost never is.

I spent a good portion of my career on the agency side, running teams and managing client relationships across more than thirty industries. One thing I noticed early on is that the campaigns people remember as brilliant were rarely described that way in the room when they were being developed. They were described as uncomfortable, or too simple, or not enough. The best work often looked like a risk before it looked like genius.

What Makes an Advertisement Genuinely Great?

Before walking through specific campaigns, it is worth being clear about the criteria. Greatness in advertising is not the same as popularity, virality, or critical acclaim. Those things can accompany great work, but they are not the definition of it.

A great advertisement does at least one of the following things measurably well: it builds brand salience in a way that compounds over time, it shifts perception among a target audience that was previously indifferent or hostile, or it drives a commercial outcome that would not have happened without it. Ideally it does all three. Often it does two.

When I was judging the Effie Awards, the standard was effectiveness, not creativity in isolation. You could enter the most beautiful campaign ever made, but if you could not demonstrate that it moved something in the market, it would not win. That discipline clarified my thinking about what advertising is actually for. It is not self-expression. It is not brand therapy. It is a commercial tool, and the best executions are the ones that use it with precision.

That said, precision does not mean safe. Some of the most effective campaigns in history were anything but safe. They were precise about the insight, the audience, and the intended effect, and then they took a creative swing that most clients would have flinched at. The courage was in the clarity of the brief, not the recklessness of the execution.

If you are thinking about how advertising fits into a broader commercial strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the structural decisions that determine whether great creative has anything meaningful to land on.

The Volkswagen “Think Small” Campaign

In the late 1950s, Volkswagen asked Doyle Dane Bernbach to help sell a small, ugly German car to an American market that was obsessed with large, chrome-heavy vehicles. The brief was, by any rational measure, a nightmare. The product had no obvious advantage in the category Americans cared about. It was the opposite of aspirational.

What DDB did was refuse to hide the product’s limitations and instead make the limitations the point. “Think Small” ran in 1959 and is still cited, more than six decades later, as one of the most influential advertisements ever produced. The honesty was disarming. The restraint was radical. In a market full of bombast, a small headline and a lot of white space communicated confidence in a way that no amount of superlative copy could have matched.

The lesson is not “be honest about your product’s weaknesses.” That is too literal. The lesson is that the brief should tell you what is actually true about the product, and the creative should find the most compelling way to say that true thing. DDB did not invent the car’s smallness. They found a way to make it mean something different to the audience they were trying to reach.

This is harder than it sounds. Most briefs I have read in my career describe the product the client wishes they had, not the product they actually have. That gap between aspiration and reality is where most campaigns quietly fall apart before they ever reach a consumer.

Apple’s “1984” and the Power of a Single Moment

Apple’s “1984” commercial aired once during the Super Bowl and became one of the most discussed advertisements in history. Directed by Ridley Scott, it positioned Apple as the antidote to conformity and IBM as the grey monolith of corporate control. The product, the Macintosh, was barely shown. The idea was everything.

What made it work commercially was not the production quality, though that was exceptional for its time. It was the positioning clarity. Apple had decided what it stood for, and the advertisement expressed that position with total commitment. There was no hedging. No “and also.” No attempt to appeal to everyone. It was made for a specific kind of person who wanted to see themselves as different, and it told that person exactly what Apple believed.

The BCG work on brand strategy and go-to-market alignment makes a point that is relevant here: brand decisions and commercial decisions cannot be made in separate rooms. The “1984” campaign worked because the positioning was not just a marketing choice. It was a business choice. Apple had committed to a product philosophy and the advertising expressed that philosophy, rather than papering over a product that had not yet found its identity.

I have seen the opposite play out in agency pitches more times than I can count. A client comes in with a product that has not been properly positioned, asks for a campaign that will “create excitement,” and then wonders why the creative feels generic. You cannot advertise your way out of a positioning problem. Apple did not have that problem in 1984. They had made the hard decision about who they were, and the advertising simply said it loudly.

Nike’s “Just Do It” and What Brand Consistency Actually Means

Nike launched “Just Do It” in 1988. The campaign ran for decades in various forms and became one of the most recognised brand lines in the world. What is easy to forget, looking back, is that Nike was not the dominant force it later became when the campaign launched. Reebok was outselling them in the US. The campaign was a bet on a particular kind of consumer, a particular emotional register, and a long-term brand position that had not yet been proven.

The line itself is three words. It does not describe the product. It does not list a benefit. It does not explain why Nike is better than Reebok. It expresses a belief about human potential and invites the audience to associate themselves with that belief. That is brand advertising in its purest form, and it works over time in a way that promotional advertising simply cannot replicate.

Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel performance. I was good at it. I could show the numbers, point to the conversions, and make a clean case for efficiency. What I came to understand, gradually and sometimes painfully, is that much of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The person who was already searching for your product was already on their way. You captured them, which is valuable, but you did not create them.

Nike’s “Just Do It” created people. It reached audiences who were not yet in the market and made them feel something about the brand before they needed a pair of trainers. When they eventually needed trainers, Nike was already in the consideration set. That is how brand advertising compounds over time, and it is why the campaigns worth studying are almost always the ones that built something, not the ones that harvested it.

Dove’s “Real Beauty” and the Risk of a Genuine Insight

Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign launched in 2004 and ran for years across multiple markets. It challenged the beauty industry’s standard of aspirational imagery by featuring women who did not fit the conventional advertising mould. It was a genuine strategic decision, not a creative flourish layered over a standard brief.

The insight behind it was real: a significant proportion of women did not see themselves represented in beauty advertising, and that gap between the image on screen and the person looking at it created distance rather than aspiration. Dove’s bet was that closing that gap would build stronger brand affinity than widening it. They were right, and the commercial results followed.

What makes this campaign worth studying is not the social message, though that is what most people remember. It is the fact that the insight was actionable. It was specific enough to brief against, bold enough to be distinctive, and true enough to sustain over time. Plenty of brands have tried to replicate the social purpose angle without doing the work of finding a genuine insight first. The results are usually unconvincing, because audiences can tell the difference between a brand that believes something and a brand that is performing belief for commercial purposes.

The challenge for most marketing teams is that genuine insights require genuine research. Not a survey of two hundred people on a panel. Not a focus group where respondents tell you what they think you want to hear. Real understanding of how people think about themselves, their lives, and the category you operate in. That kind of work takes time and it is often uncomfortable, because it surfaces things the client does not want to hear about their product or their audience.

Guinness “Surfer” and the Brief I Almost Ran

I have a personal connection to Guinness advertising, though not to this specific campaign. Early in my career at Cybercom, there was a brainstorm for Guinness and the founder had to leave for a client meeting. He handed me the whiteboard pen mid-session. My internal reaction was something close to panic. Guinness had one of the most distinctive creative heritages in British advertising, and suddenly I was the one supposed to be generating ideas in that space. I did it anyway, and the experience taught me something about what it actually takes to work on a brand with that kind of creative weight behind it.

The “Surfer” advertisement, produced by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO in 1999, is regularly cited as one of the greatest British advertisements ever made. The tagline “Good things come to those who wait” was not new. Guinness had used it before. What the “Surfer” execution did was give that line a visual metaphor so powerful that it made the wait feel epic rather than inconvenient. The horses in the waves. The patience of the surfer. The reward of the pint at the end. It turned a product limitation, the fact that Guinness takes longer to pour than most beers, into a brand virtue.

That reframing is one of the most valuable things advertising can do. It does not change the product. It changes the meaning of the product’s characteristics. And it does so in a way that is emotionally resonant rather than rationally argued, because rational arguments about why waiting is actually good tend not to survive contact with a thirsty consumer.

Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” and Tone as Strategy

Old Spice was a brand that had been written off. It was associated with an older generation, carried the faint smell of irrelevance, and was losing ground in a category that had become crowded with younger, more aggressively marketed competitors. The 2010 campaign, created by Wieden and Kennedy, did not try to fix Old Spice by making it serious. It fixed it by making it absurd.

The tone was the strategy. By leaning into self-aware humour rather than aspirational imagery, Old Spice created a campaign that was genuinely entertaining and that spread through social channels in a way that few television advertisements had managed at that point. More importantly, it worked commercially. Sales increased significantly in the period following the campaign’s launch.

The lesson here is about matching tone to audience and moment. Old Spice could not have run a serious, aspirational campaign and won. The brand did not have the credibility for it. The audience would not have believed it. The humour was not a creative indulgence. It was the only viable route into the conversation, and the team at Wieden and Kennedy had the clarity to see that and the courage to commit to it fully.

Tone is underrated as a strategic decision. Most briefs specify what the campaign should say. Fewer specify how it should feel, and even fewer specify why that emotional register is the right one for this audience at this moment. When tone is treated as a creative decoration rather than a strategic choice, you get campaigns that say the right things in the wrong way, and they tend not to land.

What These Campaigns Have in Common

Running across all of these campaigns, and across the best advertising I have seen in my own career, are a small number of consistent characteristics. They are worth naming plainly, because they are not mysterious.

First, they are all built on a specific, defensible insight about the audience. Not a demographic description. Not a persona. An actual observation about how people think or feel in relation to the category or the brand. That insight is the foundation everything else is built on, and when it is weak, the creative cannot save it.

Second, they commit. There is no hedging, no attempt to appeal to everyone, no softening of the central idea to avoid offending someone in a focus group. The best advertising is made by people who decided what they wanted to say and then said it as clearly and compellingly as possible. That requires a client who can back a judgment call, and those clients are rarer than they should be.

Third, they are connected to a commercial reality. The “1984” campaign expressed a real positioning decision Apple had made about its products. The Dove campaign was built on a real gap between audience experience and category norms. The Guinness campaign turned a real product characteristic into a brand virtue. None of these campaigns were invented in isolation from the business they were supposed to serve.

The Forrester analysis of go-to-market struggles identifies a pattern that applies well beyond healthcare: the gap between brand positioning decisions and the commercial realities they are supposed to support. The campaigns that endure are the ones where that gap is small.

Fourth, they are consistent over time. “Just Do It” did not become iconic because of a single execution. It became iconic because Nike ran it, and ran it, and ran it, and every time they ran it they reinforced the same emotional territory. Consistency compounds. Most brands do not give their campaigns long enough to find out whether they work, because they get bored before the audience does.

Why Most Campaigns Do Not Reach This Standard

The honest answer is that most campaigns do not reach this standard because the conditions that produce great advertising are difficult to create and easy to disrupt. A weak brief produces weak creative. A client who cannot back a judgment call produces safe work. A team that changes the campaign every eighteen months produces nothing that compounds. These are structural problems, not creative ones.

I have managed large advertising budgets across multiple markets and multiple categories. The campaigns that performed best were almost never the ones that had been through the most rounds of revision. They were the ones where the brief was clear, the insight was real, and someone in the room, client or agency, had the confidence to say “this is right, let’s run it.”

The campaigns that underperformed were usually ones where the brief had been written by committee, the insight had been smoothed into something inoffensive, and the creative had been revised until it no longer surprised anyone. By the time those campaigns ran, the people who had worked on them were already tired of them. The audience, encountering them for the first time, tended to feel the same.

Understanding what separates effective advertising from activity that simply fills media space is part of a broader set of questions about growth strategy and go-to-market planning. The creative work matters enormously, but it operates within a commercial framework that determines whether it has anything meaningful to achieve.

The Vidyard analysis of why go-to-market feels harder points to something relevant here: the proliferation of channels and formats has made it easier to distribute advertising and harder to make advertising that actually cuts through. The answer is not more sophisticated targeting. The answer is better creative built on sharper insight, which is exactly what the campaigns above demonstrate.

What Marketers Should Take From the Best Advertisements

The practical question is what any of this means for someone working on a campaign today. The answer is not to try to replicate the specific executions. “Think Small” worked in 1959 for reasons that were specific to that moment, that market, and that product. Copying the aesthetic without understanding the reasoning would produce something nostalgic and empty.

What is worth taking from these campaigns is the process that produced them. Start with a genuine insight. Write a brief that is specific enough to be useful and clear enough to be briefed against. Make a decision about what you want the audience to feel, not just what you want them to know. Commit to the creative direction that best expresses that decision. Give it enough time to work.

That process sounds straightforward. In practice, it requires resisting a series of pressures that push in the opposite direction: the pressure to say more, to appeal to a broader audience, to hedge the message, to change direction when the first round of results is ambiguous, to prioritise short-term metrics over long-term brand building.

The BCG perspective on brand strategy and go-to-market alignment is useful here: the organisations that build strong brands over time are the ones where marketing decisions are connected to commercial strategy, not running parallel to it. The best campaigns are not produced by the most creative agencies. They are produced by the organisations that have done the hardest work before the creative brief is written.

The measurement question is also worth addressing directly. Several of the campaigns above, particularly the brand-building ones, would not have survived a modern performance marketing dashboard. The short-term signals would have looked weak. The attribution would have been unclear. The temptation to redirect budget toward something more measurable would have been significant.

That is not an argument against measurement. It is an argument for measuring the right things over the right timeframe. Brand advertising works differently from performance advertising, and evaluating it using performance metrics produces misleading conclusions. The best marketing organisations I have worked with understand this distinction and build their measurement frameworks accordingly. The ones that struggle tend to have collapsed everything into a single attribution model that rewards short-term efficiency and penalises long-term brand building.

There is also a useful point to make about the role of creators and distribution in modern campaign planning. The Later webinar on going to market with creators covers some of the practical mechanics of how brand-building campaigns can be distributed through creator networks, which changes some of the execution considerations without changing the underlying principles. The insight still needs to be real. The commitment still needs to be there. The creative still needs to earn attention rather than buy it.

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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