Unforgettable Advertisement

Author: Unforgettable Advertisement

  • IKEA’s “Lamp”: The Ad That Made Us Feel Sorry for a Lamp, Then Told Us Not To

    IKEA’s “Lamp”: The Ad That Made Us Feel Sorry for a Lamp, Then Told Us Not To

    A woman throws out a red table lamp, and it is left abandoned in the rain. The camera shows the lamp’s view while its former owner enjoys a brand new IKEA lamp indoors. Then a man walks into the frame, turns to the camera and tells us that many of us feel bad for this lamp.

    The man was Jonas Fornander, a Swede who had never acted before. Director Spike Jonze wanted someone who looked like an IKEA worker who had walked out of the store and onto the street. The 60-second ad was released on September 15, 2002, made by the agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky as part of IKEA’s “Unboring” campaign, and its message was blunt: the old lamp has no feelings, and the new one is much better.

    It worked. IKEA’s sales rose 8 percent while the campaign ran, and the ad won a Film Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, a Grand Clio and gold awards from several other festivals. In 2009, Boards magazine voted it one of the top ten television ads of the decade.

    Not everyone liked it. Critic Rob Walker noted that the campaign could link IKEA to landfill and to following trends. In 2018 IKEA answered with a sequel, “Lamp 2,” with the same actor, this time promoting reuse and recycling.

  • Levi’s “Laundrette”: The Ad That Sent a Man in Boxer Shorts Into Denim History

    Levi’s “Laundrette”: The Ad That Sent a Man in Boxer Shorts Into Denim History

    On Boxing Day 1985, British television viewers watched a young man in a T-shirt and Levi’s 501 jeans walk into a laundromat in small-town America, styled to look like the late 1950s or early 1960s. In front of the other customers, he took off his jeans down to his boxer shorts and put them in a washing machine.

    The man was the model Nick Kamen, and the ad came from the agency BBH, which had won the Levi’s account in 1982. It was the idea of BBH cofounder John Hegarty, written with Barbara Nokes, and directed by Roger Lyons. The soundtrack was Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” a 1968 Motown single.

    Its effect on sales is often described in huge numbers. Levi’s own history of the ad says that by some estimates sales rose about 800 percent afterward, and another account says the company sold more than two million pairs of boxer shorts in a year. Kamen went on to a music career and had a top-five hit, “Each Time You Break My Heart,” which he co-wrote with Madonna.

    Campaign magazine later named it among the best ads of the previous 50 years. In 2006 it was parodied for Comic Relief, with David Beckham and June Brown recreating the scene in the same laundromat.

  • The Best Super Bowl Ads We’ve Covered, From Apple’s 1984 to Oreo’s Blackout Tweet

    The Best Super Bowl Ads We’ve Covered, From Apple’s 1984 to Oreo’s Blackout Tweet

    The Super Bowl is the one night when advertising becomes the main event. Here are the seven Super Bowl stories we have covered so far, each with a link to the full article and the video.

    Apple’s “1984” (1984)

    Aired only once, during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984. Directed by Ridley Scott, it never showed the Macintosh computer it was selling.

    Google’s “Parisian Love” (2010)

    A love story told entirely through search queries, made in-house at Google by a small team called the “Google 5.”

    Volkswagen’s “The Force” (2011)

    A six-year-old Darth Vader, played by Max Page, tries to use the Force. Volkswagen posted it online four days before the game.

    Budweiser’s “Brotherhood” (2013)

    A trainer and the Clydesdale he raised, set to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” It topped the USA Today Ad Meter that year.

    Oreo’s “Dunk in the Dark” (2013)

    Not a commercial at all: a single tweet posted during the stadium blackout that was retweeted almost 15,000 times.

    Snickers’ “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry”

    Betty White ends up in the mud in the ad that gave the campaign line “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” one of its best-known moments.

    Always’ “Like a Girl”

    A Super Bowl ad that turned a common insult into a rallying cry.

    Want more? Browse the full Super Bowl Ads category, or explore the Viral Ads and Emotional Ads categories.

  • Oreo’s “Dunk in the Dark”: The Tweet That Became a Super Bowl Ad

    Oreo’s “Dunk in the Dark”: The Tweet That Became a Super Bowl Ad

    The ad was a tweet, so there is no video. Here it is as Oreo posted it:

    Most Super Bowl ads cost millions to make and millions more to air. One of the most talked-about ads of Super Bowl XLVII was not a commercial at all. On February 3, 2013, after halftime, the lights in the New Orleans Superdome went out for about half an hour. At 8:48 p.m., Oreo posted a single picture to Twitter with the words “Power out? No problem,” and a line that became famous: “You can still dunk in the dark.”

    It looked spontaneous, but it was prepared. The agency 360i had a war room for the game with about ten people in it, including writers, designers and strategists, and staff at Kraft, Oreo’s parent company, were part of the approval chain. The account of the night in Digiday’s oral history says the creative director Michael Nuzzo had the post assembled in under a minute, and the wording “You can still dunk in the dark” came from a Kraft brand manager during approval.

    The result was out of proportion to the effort. The tweet was retweeted almost 15,000 times, and Oreo’s Twitter following grew by about 8,000. The next day the Huffington Post wrote that one of the most buzz-worthy ads of the game was “a mere tweet from Oreo during the blackout.”

    The lesson of the tweet is not speed alone. Oreo had built a team and an approval process before it knew what would happen, so it could act the moment something did. Many brands have tried to copy the idea since, and it works best when the approval process is built for speed, as Oreo’s was.

  • Netflix’s “The Last House” Billboard: The Ad Where a Man Actually Lived Above Sunset Boulevard

    Netflix’s “The Last House” Billboard: The Ad Where a Man Actually Lived Above Sunset Boulevard

    The stunt was a live event, not a filmed commercial, so this is CBS LA’s news report on the billboard.

    In August 2026, drivers on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles looked up and saw something that should not have been there: a house built into a billboard about 30 feet above the street, with a man living inside it. Behind a bay window was a fully furnished living room with a couch, and the man wore pajamas, drank coffee, ate cereal and scanned the street through a pair of binoculars.

    It was a stunt for Netflix’s sci-fi thriller “The Last House,” starring Greta Lee and Wagner Moura and directed by Louis Leterrier. The film follows a family sealed inside their home, with the whole town trapped too, and its tagline asks, “How long can you survive?” The billboard turned that idea into something people could see from their cars. The man talked to people below by waving and holding up a whiteboard with messages, including “Stuck in here.”

    The set was built at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Selma Avenue and reportedly air-conditioned for the performer’s comfort. The Drum names the live experience studio Extra Credit as the agency behind it, and My Modern Met names the performer as Nathan Shoop, an LA-based actor and experiential producer. The stunt ran for a few days around the film’s August 7 release, and Netflix later posted a video of him leaving the billboard to answer fans’ questions.

    News crews and social media carried the footage far beyond Los Angeles. The film itself opened with 27.5 million views in its first three days and was Netflix’s most-watched title that week, though no source shows how much of that came from the billboard. What the stunt does show is a simple rule of good outdoor advertising: if the ad puts a real person in the story, people will stop, look, and tell someone else about it.

  • Budweiser’s “Brotherhood”: The Ad Where a Horse Remembered Who Raised It

    Budweiser’s “Brotherhood”: The Ad Where a Horse Remembered Who Raised It

    A trainer raises a Clydesdale foal from its first wobbly steps, working with it every day until it is ready to join Budweiser’s famous hitch. Three years pass in a single cut. A truck arrives to take the fully grown horse away, and the trainer is left standing alone in the field, proud but clearly empty without the animal he raised.

    He spots a newspaper headline announcing that the Budweiser Clydesdales are coming to Chicago and drives into the city to see the horse one more time. Standing at the edge of the parade route, he watches his horse pass by in formation and turns to leave, assuming he has not been noticed. Then the Clydesdale breaks from the group and gallops back to him, exactly as it used to when he called it as a foal, while Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” plays over the reunion.

    The 2013 Super Bowl spot, called “Brotherhood,” was made by the agency Anomaly and directed by Jake Scott. Horse trainer Tommie Turvey worked with eight Clydesdales for two weeks before narrowing the cast down to three for the final shoot, and the production moved between Budweiser’s Warm Springs Ranch in Missouri, Thousand Oaks in California, and the streets of downtown Los Angeles standing in for Chicago.

    The ad topped the USA Today Ad Meter for that year’s Super Bowl and had racked up close to 12 million YouTube views within two months. Budweiser later ran a fan contest to name the foal from the commercial, and it became known as Hope. It remains one of the clearest examples of the brand’s long-running trick: never once showing anyone drink a beer, and still making the whole audience feel something.