Unforgettable Advertisement

Author: Unforgettable Advertisement

  • Snickers’ “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry”: The Ad That Put Betty White in the Mud

    Snickers’ “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry”: The Ad That Put Betty White in the Mud

    Betty White, then 88 years old, gets tackled face-first into the mud during a backyard football game — and it’s the funniest thing on television that night. The line that sells it isn’t even about White. It’s what a friend says right before: “You’re playing like Betty White out there.”

    For Super Bowl XLIV in February 2010, Snickers and agency BBDO New York built a simple sketch: a grumpy, clumsy teammate named Mike is dragging down his friends’ pickup football game, so badly they compare him to the elderly actress currently getting flattened in the mud beside him. One bite of a Snickers bar later, Mike is back to his younger, competent self — and his girlfriend on the sidelines just sighs, “Mike! Come on.”

    The ad was an immediate sensation, dominating morning shows and Super Bowl ad rankings the next day and reintroducing Betty White to a generation that barely knew her — momentum that helped fuel her surprise casting on Saturday Night Live weeks later. Snickers turned the one-off joke into a permanent tagline, running “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” spots with a rotating cast of celebrities for more than a decade after.

    The campaign drove nearly 16% global sales growth in its first year and an estimated $376 million in incremental sales within two years, making it one of the most commercially successful Super Bowl campaigns ever run. Betty White, for her part, spent the rest of her career as one of America’s most beloved comedic actresses — mud and all.

  • Guinness’s “Surfer”: The Two-Minute Wait That Became the Greatest British Ad Ever Made

    Guinness’s “Surfer”: The Two-Minute Wait That Became the Greatest British Ad Ever Made

    A surfer stares at the horizon, paddles out, and waits. And waits. When the wave finally arrives, it isn’t water — it’s a stampede of enormous white horses crashing through the surf. He rides it anyway. The whole thing is a metaphor for a pint of stout.

    Guinness and agency AMV BBDO built “Surfer” around an inconvenient fact: a proper pint of draught Guinness takes close to two minutes to pour, most of it spent waiting for the head to settle. Rather than hide that, the 1999 campaign turned it into the brand’s whole identity, closing on the line “Good things come to those who wait.” Director Jonathan Glazer shot the ad in black and white, with a thundering remix of Leftfield’s “Phat Planet” driving the horses through the waves.

    The ad became an instant landmark in British advertising, repeatedly voted the greatest television commercial ever made in industry and public polls over the following decades. At the 1999 Cannes Lions festival it won the Grand Prix for Film, the highest honor in the medium, and it’s still taught in advertising courses as a masterclass in turning a weakness into a myth.

    More than two decades on, “Good things come to those who wait” remains one of the most recognized taglines in advertising, and the surfer-and-horses imagery is still referenced across pop culture. Guinness never had to apologize for how long its pint takes to pour — it made people proud to wait for one.

  • Always’ “Like a Girl”: The Super Bowl Ad That Turned an Insult Into a Rallying Cry

    Always’ “Like a Girl”: The Super Bowl Ad That Turned an Insult Into a Rallying Cry

    “Run like a girl.” Told to act it out, a teenage girl flails her arms and giggles. Told the same thing, a ten-year-old just runs — fast, serious, arms pumping. The gap between those two reactions is the entire ad.

    In June 2014, Always released a three-minute film directed by Lauren Greenfield that asked people of different ages to demonstrate what it looks like to “run like a girl,” “throw like a girl,” and “fight like a girl.” Teenagers and adults performed exaggerated, mocking versions. Girls under twelve, who hadn’t yet absorbed the insult, simply did their best. The film ends with a question stitched into decades of playground taunts: when did “like a girl” become something to be ashamed of?

    The video passed 90 million views within months, becoming one of the most-shared ads of 2014, and P&G doubled down by cutting a 60-second version for Super Bowl XLIX in February 2015 — one of the rare Super Bowl spots built entirely around a social message rather than a punchline. It sparked the #LikeAGirl hashtag and a wave of imitators trying to bottle the same formula.

    The campaign went on to collect 14 Cannes Lions, an Emmy, and a spot on YouTube’s list of the decade’s most-watched ads, while Always reported a measurable jump in how positively people viewed the brand. More than a decade later, “like a girl” is still more often used the way those ten-year-olds meant it — as a fact, not an insult.

  • Cadbury’s “Gorilla”: The Chocolate Ad With No Chocolate In It

    Cadbury’s “Gorilla”: The Chocolate Ad With No Chocolate In It

    A gorilla in a purple silk shirt sits behind a drum kit, stares into the middle distance for eleven long seconds, then launches into Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” — one of the most-quoted drum fills in music history. Ninety seconds later, the ad ends. Nobody has said a single word about chocolate.

    Cadbury and agency Fallon London released “Gorilla” in August 2007, less than a year after a salmonella contamination scare had forced a nationwide product recall and put the company’s reputation on the line. Director Juan Cabral built the ad around a single line in Cadbury’s brief: a joyful expression of the brand. There’s no dialogue, no tagline until the final frame, and no attempt to explain what a drumming gorilla has to do with a chocolate bar.

    Audiences didn’t need it explained. The ad became one of the most talked-about commercials in British advertising history, racking up views and press coverage for weeks and spawning a wave of parodies and tribute performances. At the 2008 Cannes Lions festival it won the Film Grand Prix, the industry’s top prize, and it’s still regularly ranked among the best commercials ever made.

    Dairy Milk sales rose roughly 9% in the months after the campaign launched, and Cadbury credited “Gorilla” with restoring the affection the salmonella scandal had cost it. Two decades later, marketers still cite it as the textbook example of an ad that sells a feeling instead of a feature — and gets remembered for it.

  • Metro Trains’ “Dumb Ways to Die”: The Cutest Train Safety Ad Ever Made

    Metro Trains’ “Dumb Ways to Die”: The Cutest Train Safety Ad Ever Made

    A limbless cartoon bean swallows a tube of superglue, grins, and keels over — set to a chirpy singalong tune. It doesn’t mention trains once in the first two minutes. That was the point.

    In November 2012, Metro Trains Melbourne needed to cut the number of accidents and near-misses at its railway crossings and platforms, a problem blunt warning signs had failed to solve for years. Agency McCann Melbourne and animator Julian Frost built a three-minute music video instead of a PSA: pastel, legless characters set themselves on fire, poke bears with sticks, and swallow unidentified pills, all narrated by a bouncy song from the studio act Tangerine Kitty. The actual rail-safety advice — don’t stand near the platform edge, don’t run across tracks — arrives only in the final ten seconds.

    The strategy worked almost too well as pure entertainment. The song hit the top 10 on iTunes in multiple countries within a day, the video crossed 100 million views within weeks, and it went on to become one of the most-watched public safety films ever made, eventually topping 340 million views on YouTube alone. At the 2013 Cannes Lions festival it won a record 28 Lions, including the Titanium Grand Prix, briefly making it the most awarded campaign in the festival’s history.

    Metro Trains reported a meaningful drop in near-miss incidents at its stations in the year after launch — exactly the outcome the old warning signs never delivered. The characters went on to star in a mobile game that hit number one on app charts in dozens of countries, spinoff videos, and even a stage musical, proof that a safety message travels a lot farther set to a hook than a horn.

  • Nike’s “Dream Crazy”: The Ad That Survived a Boycott and Won an Emmy

    Nike’s “Dream Crazy”: The Ad That Survived a Boycott and Won an Emmy

    “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.” Nine words, spoken by a quarterback no NFL team would sign, turned into the most polarizing thirty seconds of advertising in a generation — and Nike knew exactly what it was doing.

    In September 2018, to mark the 30th anniversary of “Just Do It,” Nike and longtime agency Wieden+Kennedy built a campaign around Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who had knelt during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police violence against Black Americans and hadn’t played a regular-season snap since. The ad paired his voice with black-and-white footage of athletes fighting long odds — an eight-year-old wrestler born without a leg, Serena Williams, LeBron James — before closing on Kaepernick’s own face and the line that made the campaign a lightning rod.

    The backlash was instant and loud. Videos of people burning Nike sneakers and cutting the swoosh off their socks flooded social media under #BoycottNike and #JustBurnIt, and Nike’s stock dropped roughly 3% on the ad’s opening day. The president weighed in on Twitter. Sports commentators argued about it for weeks.

    Then the numbers moved the other way. Nike’s online sales jumped 31% in the days after the spot aired, according to Edison Trends, and the stock closed at an all-time high within a month. Nike had bet correctly on who its actual customer was — not the crowd burning shoes on camera, but the much larger, younger audience that agreed with Kaepernick.

    The campaign went on to win an Emmy for Outstanding Commercial in 2019 — an award voted on by the same industry that had spent a year arguing about it. Kaepernick still hasn’t played in the NFL again. The ad outlasted the controversy by years.