7 ad campaign examples worth studying
Eight verified ad campaign examples from 2021 to 2024, each with the brand's own film embedded and the repeatable creative device you can borrow.
A good ad campaign is one creative idea built to repeat: a device strong enough that a billboard, a film, and a social cut all read as the same thought. The three I would study first from this list are Orange’s WoMen’s Football (2023), which hides its argument inside a highlight reel, Cadbury’s Not Just a Cadbury Ad (2021), which turned one celebrity film into thousands of local ads, and Dramamine’s The Last Barf Bag (2024), which built a whole campaign around an object the product made obsolete.
I co-founded a creative studio, and a lot of my week is spent pulling other people’s campaigns apart with clients before we build theirs. The lists that usually rank for this search recycle the same museum pieces: Old Spice on the horse, Think Different, the Dollar Shave Club video. That canon has already been dissected in every marketing classroom, and some of it is covered in our commercial advertisement examples roundup already. This list is different on purpose. Every entry below is from 2021 to 2024, every campaign name is real, every film is embedded from the brand’s or studio’s own channel, and every claim traces to a named, dated source. Where a campaign underperformed, I say so, because the misses teach as much as the wins.
1. Orange, “WoMen’s Football” (2023)
French telecom Orange released a hype film for Les Bleus ahead of the 2023 Women’s World Cup. Two minutes of brilliant goals and touches, apparently from the stars of the men’s national team, then the reveal: the faces had been added with VFX, and every piece of skill was actually played by the French women’s team, including Sakina Karchaoui and Delphine Cascarino. The film then replays the same moves untouched.
Time covered the film on July 17, 2023, noting it launched in late June ahead of the July 20 kickoff and spread across Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit, where thousands of fans marveled at the effects and the message. A year later it won the Entertainment Lions for Sport Grand Prix, as Ad Age reported from Cannes in June 2024.
The device is a trap for your own bias. You cannot watch the second half without confronting what you assumed in the first. Here is the film on Orange France’s channel.
The lesson travels beyond sport. If your audience holds a lazy assumption about your category, structure the campaign so they catch themselves holding it.
2. Cadbury Celebrations, “Not Just a Cadbury Ad” (2021)
For Diwali 2021, Cadbury India took its biggest asset, a film starring Shah Rukh Khan, and handed it to small shopkeepers. Using machine learning from Rephrase.ai, any local store owner could generate a version of the ad in which Khan says their shop’s name and urges people to buy locally, then run it on their own social channels. One production shoot became thousands of hyperlocal ads.
The campaign, credited to Ogilvy Mumbai with Wavemaker, went on to win big: Contagious listed “Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad” for Cadbury Celebrations among the Titanium winners at Cannes Lions on June 24, 2022, the award reserved for work that moves the industry.
Watch the campaign film on Cadbury Celebrations’ own channel, then notice how the celebrity is not the point. The generosity is.
The mechanism worth stealing is media donation. The brand spent its reach on someone else’s business, and the goodwill flowed back to the chocolate. Personalization tech made it scale; the idea would still work at ten stores instead of thousands.
3. Inspired by Iceland, “Joyscroll” (2021)
Iceland’s tourism body found a behavioral insight and built the whole campaign on it: Famous Campaigns reported on January 15, 2021 that “on average, one person scrolls through 22.7m (74.47ft) of bad news on their social media feeds each day.” So Inspired by Iceland built joyscroll.com, a feed exactly that long, filled with waterfalls, soothing streams, peaceful landscapes, and the soundtracks of Icelandic musicians, and invited the world to scroll through joy instead of doom. A launch film pushed the idea into the same feeds it was teasing.
The film still sits on the Inspired by Iceland channel.
What I like here is the shape: a measured cultural habit, flipped into a product demo for a country. Destination marketing usually shows scenery and hopes. Joyscroll gave people something to do with the scenery, and the doing was itself an argument for the trip. If you write storytelling ads, this is a reminder that the story can live in an interaction, not only in a film.
4. Waitrose, “Sweet Suspicion” (2024)
British grocer Waitrose split its 2024 Christmas ad into a two-part whodunnit. Part one, launched in early November, sets up the theft of a red velvet bauble dessert at a family Christmas, with a cast including Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen as the detective, and stops on a cliffhanger. Viewers debated and polled suspects on social in the weeks between the two parts. Retail Gazette reported on November 26, 2024 that the reveal came in part two (“Steve, played by Demri-Burns, hid the dessert in the gingerbread house”) and that the campaign had drawn over 150 million views across social, TV, and digital by the finale.
The resolution film is on Waitrose’s own channel.
The borrowed structure is television’s, not advertising’s: a serialized story with a gap in the middle where the audience does the marketing. The three weeks between the two spots produced the theories, the polls, and the press. A campaign that withholds its ending buys itself a second launch.
5. Dramamine, “The Last Barf Bag” (2024)
A motion sickness brand made a 13-minute documentary about the airsickness bag, the object its own product helped make unnecessary. Contagious, reporting the Cannes Lions Health and Wellness Grand Prix on June 17, 2024, described the campaign: “a 13-minute documentary, a one-day pop-up exhibition of rare collectors bags in New York, a one-of-one puffer jacket made from barf bag designs, and a dedicated website.” The film interviews real barf bag collectors and Dramamine’s own team with a completely straight face.
The full documentary lives on Dramamine’s brand channel.
For a low-interest category, the move is to find the story adjacent to the product rather than in it. Nobody wants 13 minutes on motion sickness tablets. A deadpan cultural history that quietly proves the product works, people will actually watch. It is the same logic behind the best brand awareness videos: earn the attention first, let the product ride along.
6. Canva, “What Will You Design Today?” (2022)
Canva’s first global brand campaign is the quiet one on this list, and that is why it earns its place. The Drum covered the launch on March 14, 2022: the campaign “posits the question ‘What will you design today?’ while celebrating the achievements of up-and-coming business owners as well as notable Canva clients Zoom, the UNHCR and Fast Company.” The TV spot’s narration carries the positioning in three lines: “Some say design is beyond most people’s reach. We say it’s already in your hands. So, what will you design today?”
The anchor film is on Canva’s channel.
The device is a question the customer answers by using the product. That is rarer than it sounds. Most software campaigns state a benefit; this one assigns the viewer a role. B2B teams studying the best SaaS video ads will recognize the pattern: the strongest positioning lines are prompts, and a prompt can headline a billboard, a TV spot, and an onboarding screen without rewriting.
7. Solo Stove, “Snoop Goes Smokeless” (2023)
On November 16, 2023, Snoop Dogg posted that he was “giving up smoke.” The internet took the bait for days before the reveal: it was the teaser for a Solo Stove campaign naming him the smokeless fire pit brand’s official “smokesman,” backed by a 30-second broadcast spot alongside social, podcast, out-of-home and digital elements, as Marketing Dive reported at launch on November 20, 2023. As a piece of earned-attention engineering, it was close to perfect.
Then the financials landed. Marketing Dive reported on January 19, 2024 the CFO’s admission that the campaign “raised brand awareness of Solo Stove to an expanded and new audience of consumers” but “did not lead to the sales lift that we had planned,” and the company revised its revenue expectations down.
The launch spot is still on Solo Stove’s channel, and it holds up.
I keep this one on the list because it separates two things marketers blur constantly: attention and conversion. The stunt reached the whole internet; the funnel under it was not ready to turn a viral moment about quitting smoke into fire pit purchases at a premium price point. Study it before you pitch a stunt.
The seven campaigns side by side
| Campaign | Year | The repeatable device | Where it ran | Steal it when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orange, WoMen’s Football | 2023 | A bias trap: the reveal makes viewers confront their own assumption | Online film, social, TV | Your audience holds a lazy assumption about your category |
| Cadbury, Not Just a Cadbury Ad | 2021 | One film personalized into thousands of local-store versions | Digital video, social, personalized placements | You can spend your reach on your customers’ behalf |
| Inspired by Iceland, Joyscroll | 2021 | A measured habit (22.7m of doomscrolling) flipped into an interactive feed | Interactive site, film, social | You have one sharp behavioral insight to build on |
| Waitrose, Sweet Suspicion | 2024 | A serialized story with a suspense gap in the middle | TV, social, digital | You can afford to withhold the ending and launch twice |
| Dramamine, The Last Barf Bag | 2024 | A deadpan documentary about the object your product retired | Branded film, pop-up, PR | Your category is too dull for a product-first story |
| Canva, What Will You Design Today? | 2022 | A question the customer answers by using the product | TV, digital, brand film | You need one line that works from billboard to onboarding |
| Solo Stove, Snoop Goes Smokeless | 2023 | A celebrity tease engineered for earned media, cautionary ending | Social tease, broadcast, podcast, OOH | You want a stunt and have the funnel to catch it |
What these eight share, and what they do not
Every campaign above has one device doing the heavy lifting, and every execution is a restatement of that device in a new format. That is the difference between a campaign and a pile of ads. When we break down work like this with clients, the exercise is always the same: name the device in one sentence, then check whether each placement still carries it. Collections of ad analysis examples are useful practice material for exactly this, reading a piece of work backwards from execution to mechanism until it becomes reflex.
The second shared trait is that the product sits inside the idea instead of arriving after it. Dramamine is the reason barf bags are collectible. Canva is the answer to its own question. Iceland is the joy you scroll. When the product is bolted on at the end, the campaign entertains and the brand evaporates.
The third is honesty about results. Most of what you read about campaign performance is written by the people who made the campaign. Solo Stove is the useful exception on this list precisely because the numbers went public. When you read writeups of anyone’s work, including the polished case study examples that agencies and brands publish, keep the Solo Stove question in mind: awareness moved, but did the thing the campaign was funded to move actually move?
One more filter: format-native beats format-ported. Orange’s film was built for the feed reveal, Waitrose’s mystery was built for a broadcast gap, and the campaigns in our best TikTok ads and best YouTube ads breakdowns follow the same rule. A campaign device should be chosen with its home channel in mind, then adapted outward.
Frequently asked questions
A campaign is one creative device restated across placements over time; an ad is one execution of it. The test is simple: describe the idea in a sentence, then check whether the billboard, the film, and the social cut all still carry that sentence. Orange's WoMen's Football, Cadbury's Not Just a Cadbury Ad, and Waitrose's Sweet Suspicion each survive that test, which is why one production investment kept generating new material for weeks or months.
Fewer than most media plans assume. Start with the channel the device was born for, then adapt outward only where the idea survives translation. Iceland's Joyscroll lived on an interactive site with a film to feed it, Waitrose ran two TV spots with a social voting gap between them, and Dramamine anchored on one long documentary plus PR. Channel count follows the idea; it never substitutes for one.
Sometimes, and the exceptions are instructive. Solo Stove's Snoop Dogg stunt reached the whole internet in November 2023, yet the company told investors it raised awareness without the planned sales lift. Attention converts when the audience the stunt reaches overlaps with people who might buy, and when the path from the joke to the product is short. Before funding a stunt, decide which metric it is accountable for and what will catch the attention once you have it.
