Category: Funny Ads

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.

Sixty percent. That’s roughly how much of the world’s body wash is bought by women, even though it’s marketed almost entirely to men. Wieden+Kennedy’s creative team found that insight buried in shopping data, and it became the entire foundation for one of the most quoted ad campaigns of the century.

Old Spice, a brand most twenty-somethings associated with their grandfathers, was losing ground fast to Axe by the late 2000s. Procter & Gamble handed the problem to Wieden+Kennedy Portland, whose brief wasn’t to convince young men to buy Old Spice. It was to convince the people actually standing in the aisle choosing it.

Director Tom Kuntz shot the entire 33-second spot in one uninterrupted take, with actor Isaiah Mustafa moving through a shower, a boat, and a horse without a single visible cut. No CGI, minimal editing tricks, just choreography and a script that never took itself seriously. It aired online four days before the 2010 Super Bowl and on television that same weekend.

The follow-up is what turned a good ad into a case study. Over two and a half days, the Wieden+Kennedy team filmed nearly 190 personalized video responses to fans, journalists, and celebrities on Twitter, scripting, shooting, and posting each one within hours. It became, by most measures, the fastest-growing interactive campaign YouTube had seen at that point.

The results were not subtle. Old Spice Red Zone body wash sales were up 60 percent within three months and had doubled by July. Ad Age later ranked the campaign among the best of the 21st century, and it remains one of the few ads people can still quote a line from more than a decade later.