Unforgettable Advertisement

Category: Viral Ads

Ads and stunts that spread far beyond their paid media, from Nike’s “Dream Crazy” to a man living in a Netflix billboard. Learn how they went viral and what made people share them.

  • 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.

  • Burger King’s “Moldy Whopper”: The Ad That Showed Its Burger Rotting on Purpose

    Burger King’s “Moldy Whopper”: The Ad That Showed Its Burger Rotting on Purpose

    Fast-food ads usually show the perfect burger: shiny bun, fresh lettuce, no flaws. In 2020, Burger King did the reverse. Its ad was a time-lapse of a Whopper slowly decaying, going from fresh to covered in mold, over more than a month of filming. Sources give the length as 34 or 35 days.

    The point was a message, not a joke: Burger King food uses no preservatives. The company said it had removed artificial preservatives from the Whopper in most European countries and some U.S. markets, and the WPP case study says it had removed 8,500 tonnes of artificial preservatives from its products globally over the previous three years. A burger that molds is proof, in the most visual way possible, that nothing artificial is holding it together.

    The campaign was made by the agencies INGO, DAVID Miami and Publicis Bucharest, and it was first released in Sweden in February 2020. Marketers argued about it, because putting a rotting product at the center of an ad breaks the oldest rule in food advertising. That argument turned out to be part of the plan: news outlets covered it as a story, so it reached people far beyond what its paid media could.

    The numbers were large. According to WPP, the campaign delivered a 14% sales increase, 8.4 billion impressions, $40 million in earned media value and an 88% rise in positive brand sentiment. It won major awards, including a Cannes Grand Prix and the One Show’s Best of Show. It shows that an ad can be memorable by being honest about something most brands would rather hide.

  • Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World”: The Beer Ad That Became a Meme

    Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World”: The Beer Ad That Became a Meme

    A bearded, silver-haired man appears in short scenes that go from a party to an adventure to something completely impossible, while a narrator lists facts about him that grow more absurd with each one. At the end he holds a bottle of Dos Equis and says the line that defined the campaign: “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis. Stay thirsty, my friends.”

    The campaign started in 2006, created by Euro RSCG, later Havas Worldwide, for the Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery. The character was played by Jonathan Goldsmith, who won the role with an unusual audition: he began by taking off one sock and then improvised for thirty minutes. He went on to play the role from 2006 to 2016.

    The results were strong. Sales of the beer rose every year between 2006 and 2010, Canadian sales tripled in 2008, and at one point U.S. sales grew 22% while other imported beer fell 4%. The character escaped the ads too. The format “I don’t always [X], but when I do, [Y]” became one of the internet’s best-known memes, and the character was featured in a Saturday Night Live sketch in 2012.

    Goldsmith retired in March 2016, with a final ad that sent him to Mars, and a French actor replaced him that September. The original campaign ended in 2018 and was replaced by “Keep It Interesante.” In January 2026 the brand brought Goldsmith back, which shows how strongly people still remember a character who never had to sell the beer directly.

  • Evian’s “Roller Babies”: The Ad That Made 45 Million People Watch Babies Skate

    Evian’s “Roller Babies”: The Ad That Made 45 Million People Watch Babies Skate

    In July 2009, Evian released a web film with almost no story: a crowd of babies on roller skates, dancing to the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”. There was no voiceover and no product pitch beyond the brand’s closing line. It was made for the internet first, not for TV.

    It worked on an enormous scale. Guinness World Records certified it as the most viewed online advertisement ever, with 45,166,109 views as of November 9, 2009, just a few months after launch. Its total reach passed 100 million views, and a large share of those came from fan uploads on sites far outside Evian’s own YouTube channel.

    Behind it was BETC Euro RSCG in Paris, with Rémi Babinet as creative director and Michael Gracey directing. The babies were computer-generated, but their tiny expressions were what people shared. Babinet had already made Evian’s “Water Babies” in 1998, so this was a return to a character the brand knew well, rebuilt for the YouTube era.

    The film won a Pencil at D&AD in 2010, and Evian followed it with a sequel, “Baby & Me.” Its real legacy is the lesson it gave brands: a video does not need a message to spread. If it makes people smile fast, they will pass it on for you.

  • 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.