The Creatives Room

Viral Ads

Before 'viral' was a marketing objective, it was something that happened to great work when it found an audience that couldn't stop sharing it. Dove's Evolution, Volkswagen's The Force, Dumb Ways to Die for Metro Trains - these weren't campaigns engineered to go viral; they were ideas so good that people felt compelled to share them as though they'd made a discovery. Understanding why specific pieces of content spread - and why most don't - is one of the most instructive questions in contemporary advertising.

The campaigns in this collection

  1. And Then There's This - Penguin · Ben Wiseman · 2010

    Cover for Bill Wasik's And Then There's This. The endless multiplying pop-up windows visualise viral culture itself - content proliferating, each new thing burying the last.

  2. Cheetos Pants - Cheetos · Impact BBDO · 2021

    Humanity's most profound snacking question - what to do with Cheetle-covered fingers - solved with trousers dyed the exact shade of the dust. The insight: don't apologise for the product's mess, merchandise it; the brand's most famous 'flaw' becomes wearable fan identity.

  3. DollarShaveClub.com - Our Blades Are F***ing Great - Dollar Shave Club · agency two · 2012

    Founder Michael Dubin walks his own warehouse to camera, deadpan, asking whether your razor really needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a back-scratcher and ten blades - one take of improv-trained sarcasm, shot for almost nothing. The insight is that the razor category had spent decades adding fe

  4. Eyebrows - Cadbury · Fallon London · 2009

    Two children sit in a photographer's studio waiting to be photographed. He steps out to take a call. The boy clicks his watch, Freestyle's 'Don't Stop The Rock' kicks in, and the pair perform an entire dance using only their eyebrows before he returns. The insight is that a moment of joy is somethin

  5. Great for the Good - CRED · 2021

    Rahul Dravid - 'The Wall', Indian cricket's byword for unshakeable calm - loses it completely in Bangalore traffic, roaring out of the sunroof as Indiranagar ka gunda, while Jim Sarbh narrates. Across six IPL films, national icons known for one immovable trait are shown doing the exact opposite. The

  6. Hari Sadu - Naukri.com · Draftfcb+Ulka · 2006

    A man phones his boss - Hari Sadu - and spells the name out to him down the line: H for Hitler, A for Arrogant, R for Rascal, I for Idiot. The boss sits there and takes it, because the caller has already got another job. It closes on 'guess who just heard from us?'. The insight is that 90% of people

  7. A.I. Ketchup - Heinz · Rethink · 2023

    To prove its status as the world’s most iconic ketchup, Heinz turned to an unusual, unbiased focus group: artificial intelligence. The strategy was built on the insight that the brand is so synonymous with the category that even a non-human intelligence would recognize it as the default. The creativ

  8. ASHE VERSUS - Moderna · McCann Health · 2021

    Moderna needed to shift its perception from a single-purpose COVID-19 vaccine maker to a revolutionary biotech platform capable of tackling global health challenges like HIV. Leveraging its sponsorship of the US Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the campaign tapped into the legacy of the tennis icon, rem

  9. Is It Pistachio?/ Is It Cake? - eos · the absolute group · 2026

    A game-show pastiche in which Mikey Day asks contestants to spot the cake in the room, and they settle on the boom operator - because she is wearing eos Pistachio Cashmere Body Mist and smells overwhelmingly like dessert. The insight is that the 'Is It Cake?' format trained a whole audience to distr

  10. Premier League with Ted Lasso - NBC Sports · bbdo new york · 2013

    To promote its newly acquired Premier League broadcast rights to a skeptical US audience, NBC Sports needed to overcome the cultural barrier of American sports fans who found soccer's rules and customs confusing. The campaign taps into this cultural gap by personifying the average American's bewilde

  11. STEAL - Mandaue Foam · Gigil Philippines · 2023

    Burglars break into a house and find that everything they pick up multiplies - every item they steal is instantly replaced, endlessly, until they are drowning in furniture. The insight is that a home store's real proposition is not any single product but sheer depth of range, which is the hardest th

  12. The Man Your Man Could Smell Like - Old Spice · Wieden+Kennedy · 2016

    Old Spice addressed its advertising to women rather than men, opening 'Hello ladies' - because women buy the majority of men's body wash while every ad in the category talks to men. The strategic problem was that Old Spice was inherited, an old man's brand, being beaten by Axe on teenage relevance.

  13. Unskippable Family - Geico · The Martin Agency · 2016

    A family sits down to dinner, the brand is stated immediately, and a voiceover announces that you cannot skip this ad because it is already over. Everyone then freezes in place - and holds the frame while a large dog climbs onto the table and eats their food. The insight is that pre-roll's five unsk

  14. Spoiling The Biggest Moments of 2025 | You’ve Been Warned - Netflix · netflix in-house · 2026

    A year-end film that simply spoils everything - the twists, the deaths, the winners, the endings of 2025 - with a warning and no apology. The insight is that a streaming service is the only brand on earth armed with a threat its audience genuinely fears, and that the fear is proof of how much they c

  15. Darth Vader - Volkswagen · Deutsch LA · 2011

    A small boy in a Darth Vader costume tries to use the Force on the dog, the washing machine and his sandwich, and fails every time - until his father, watching from the kitchen, secretly starts the Passat with the remote key. The insight is that the deepest pleasure of parenthood is quietly engineer

Why this collection is worth studying

Chasing virality is a reliable way to make bad advertising. Virality is a consequence, not a strategy - it happens to work that earns it by being genuinely remarkable. The campaigns in this archive went viral because they were funny, or moving, or surprising, or technically astonishing, or all four. The formula, if there is one, is: make something you'd share if someone else had made it.

See also

Best Viral Ads of All Time - The Creatives Room