Decade
12 ads from the 2010s in the GOAT database.
Coca-Cola swapped its own logo for the country's most common first names on every bottle, turning a mass-produced can into something worth hunting for on a store shelf. People bought extra bottles just to find their friends' names and posted the results everywhere, giving the brand a built-in reason to be shared online. A simple packaging idea that reversed a decade of declining soda sales.
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 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.
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.
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.
P&G's Olympics platform follows mothers waking before dawn, driving through storms, and catching falls, all in service of the athletes their kids would become. It doesn't sell a single one of the company's dozens of products, it sells the idea that P&G is the sponsor of moms everywhere. The campaign proved a corporate umbrella brand could earn genuine emotion at Olympic scale.
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.
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.
A lonely little boy's best friend is a penguin who mopes around wanting a mate of his own, and the boy spends the whole film quietly plotting how to fix that for Christmas. It's a three-minute short film with barely any product in sight, built entirely to make a department store synonymous with the emotional peak of the holiday season. It cemented the UK tradition of the John Lewis Christmas ad as its own annual cultural event.
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.
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 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.