Unforgettable Advertisement

Category: Emotional Ads

Ads that made people cry, smile and feel seen. From a Clydesdale that remembered the man who raised it to a Christmas penguin looking for company, these are the stories behind advertising’s most moving moments.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Google’s “Parisian Love”: The Love Story Told in a Search Box

    Google’s “Parisian Love”: The Love Story Told in a Search Box

    The screen shows a single Google search box and nothing else. Someone types a search about studying abroad in Paris, and a story begins to unfold one search at a time. The searches move from simple things like entertainment and cafes to more permanent ones like jobs and a church, and wedding bells are heard. The last search, over the sound of a baby crying, is “how to assemble a crib.”

    The spot ran during Super Bowl XLIV in 2010, the game in which the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts 31-17. It was made in-house at Google by a small team known as the “Google 5,” recruited from ad and design schools, rather than by a big agency. In a game full of celebrities and jokes, it had no actors, no voiceover and no slogan, only a search field and soft music.

    It worked because the product was the story. Every search showed a small feature of Google in action, and the audience felt what was happening to the character without being told. Comscore, which tests ads for effectiveness, gave it a score of 51, in the top fifth of the more than 8,000 ads it had evaluated, and credited its use of music and its clear demonstration of the product.

    The ad was also strategic. Bing was pushing its “decision engine” identity at the time, and Google answered by presenting itself as a warm, trusted friend rather than a machine. “Parisian Love” is still one of the best examples of a tech company making people feel something, and it does it in sixty seconds without a single feature list.

  • Coca-Cola’s “Hey Kid, Catch!”: The Ad That Made ‘Mean’ Joe Greene Smile

    Coca-Cola’s “Hey Kid, Catch!”: The Ad That Made ‘Mean’ Joe Greene Smile

    A tired, limping football player heads down a stadium tunnel after a game. A small boy in the shadows offers him a bottle of Coke. The player, Pittsburgh Steelers defensive tackle “Mean” Joe Greene, drinks it in one go, then smiles, tosses the kid his jersey and says the line the ad is named after: “Hey kid, catch!”

    The commercial debuted on October 1, 1979, during the Major League Baseball playoffs. It was written by Penny Hawkey at McCann Erickson and directed by N. Lee Lacy, with young Tommy Okon as the boy. It aired again around Super Bowl XIV in early 1980, just as Greene’s Steelers were winning the championship, which only added to its fame.

    Nothing in it is a joke and there is no clever twist. The story is a small act of kindness between a scary-looking star and a shy fan, and a bottle of Coke is what connects them. Viewers wrote tens of thousands of letters to Coca-Cola about it, and the company later remade the idea with sports stars in other countries, including Thailand, Italy and Brazil.

    The ad won a Clio and a Cannes Gold Lion. Greene, who was a Hall of Fame player, received his Clio trophy decades later, on the ad’s 30th anniversary. It is still the standard example of how an ad can borrow an athlete’s tough image and use it to tell a warm story.

  • John Lewis’s “Monty the Penguin”: The Christmas Ad That Sold a Lonely Penguin a Girlfriend

    John Lewis’s “Monty the Penguin”: The Christmas Ad That Sold a Lonely Penguin a Girlfriend

    In Britain, the John Lewis Christmas ad is an event. The 2014 edition told a small story in two minutes: a boy named Sam and his best friend Monty, a penguin who bounces on trampolines and skids across the kitchen floor, but who quietly wants someone of his own. It was created by Adam&Eve/DDB and directed by Dougal Wilson.

    The ending is the whole trick. On Christmas morning, Sam gives Monty the one gift he could not buy himself: a penguin girlfriend, waiting in a box under the tree. The soundtrack was Tom Odell’s cover of John Lennon’s “Real Love,” and it turned a department store ad into something people wanted to talk about.

    The release was planned like a TV premiere. The film went live at 8am on YouTube and Facebook, then aired on Channel 4 during Gogglebox. It passed 2.5 million views in less than 12 hours.

    The business results followed. John Lewis’s Christmas sales rose 5.5% year on year, in a market that grew 1.5%, and eBay reported a 300% jump in penguin toys across its site. Monty later got a children’s book of his own, and the ad set the bar for every emotional Christmas ad that came after it.

  • 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.