The greatest ads of all time — ranked by you. Upvote what deserves the crown.
Be authentic. Tell a story worth sitting through. Entertain or teach. Aim for emotion. Be brave enough to look different from everyone else in the category.
Apple · 1984
Directed by Ridley Scott, this Super Bowl spot introduced the Macintosh by casting Apple as the rebel hammer-thrower smashing IBM's dystopian conformity. It aired once and rewired what a TV commercial could be — cinematic, political, and unmistakably a brand manifesto.
Mercedes-Benz · 2013
Hands move a chicken around. The chicken's head stays perfectly, eerily still. Cut to: that's how Mercedes' suspension works. A 60-second visual metaphor that you remember a decade later.
Red Bull · 2012
Red Bull put Felix Baumgartner in a balloon, took him 39 km up, and let him fall. He broke the sound barrier in free fall and the livestream broke YouTube's record for concurrent viewers. The brand stopped being a drink and became shorthand for human limits.
Nike · 2012
Nike ambushed the 2012 London Olympics without being an official sponsor by filming everyday athletes in towns called London all over the world. Greatness wasn't reserved for Usain Bolt — it was for the kid jogging through London, Ohio.
Liquid Death · 2021
Liquid Death sells water in tallboy cans and films like it's a metal label. This spot staged a kid house party where the rebellious thing they're chugging is… water. The whole brand is a marketing case study disguised as a beverage.
Nike · 2012
Nike handed Casey Neistat a budget to make a FuelBand commercial. He spent it all flying around the world with a friend for ten days and turned in the receipts as the ad. A perfect early-YouTube-era pivot from polish to authenticity.
Dollar Shave Club · 2012
Michael Dubin walked through a warehouse for 90 seconds, told you the razors were great, and made fun of Gillette. The video reportedly cost $4,500 and ended in a $1B Unilever acquisition five years later.
Domino's · 2018
Domino's started fixing potholes in American towns and stamping the patches with its logo and the line "Oh yes we did." — because bumpy roads ruin pizza. A perfect insight-to-stunt loop: feels useful, looks absurd, photographs beautifully, and turned every repaired street into free, durable out-of-home advertising for the brand.
Domino's Russia · 2018
Domino's Russia offered free pizza for 100 years to anyone who tattooed the logo on a visible spot. They had to kill the promo within days — too many people actually did it. Cheap stunt, infinite earned media, slightly horrifying.
The Guardian · 1986
A 60-second spot shows the same incident from three angles — and the meaning flips each time. It's a quiet argument for journalism, and probably the cleanest demo of brand purpose ever filmed.
SpaceX / Tesla · 2018
In Feb 2018, SpaceX strapped Elon Musk's cherry-red Roadster to Falcon Heavy and launched it into a solar orbit with a mannequin named Starman at the wheel. It was a rocket test, a Tesla ad, and a piece of internet mythology all at once — and the car is still out there, drifting around the Sun.
Volvo Trucks · 2013
Jean-Claude Van Damme does the splits between two reversing Volvo trucks while Enya plays. It's a product demo for dynamic steering — and one of the most-parodied B2B ads ever made.
Virgin Cola · 1994
Richard Branson drove a Sherman tank through Times Square and crushed a wall of Coca-Cola cans to launch Virgin Cola in the US. The product didn't survive the soda wars, but the stunt did — a textbook example of using earned media instead of paid impressions.
Apple · 1997
When Jobs came back to a near-dead Apple, the first thing he shipped wasn't a product — it was a worldview. Einstein, Gandhi, Ali, Dylan, narrated like a prayer. The company spent a decade earning the right to that voice.