Best TV commercials: 9 recent spots worth studying
Nine of the best TV commercials from 2021 to 2026, each verified and embedded, with the one craft decision worth stealing from every spot.
The best TV commercials of the last few years are The Farmer’s Dog’s Forever, Tubi’s Interface Interruption, and DoorDash’s All the Ads: one earns emotion with a single lifelong relationship, one turns the TV interface itself into the joke, and one turns every other ad in the break into its own prize pool.
I work at Moonb, and part of my job is watching commercials the way an editor watches dailies. Clients forward me spots all the time with the same question: why does this work? Most lists that claim to answer it reach straight for the museum, usually starting with Apple’s Think Different, work that was brilliant and has been analysed to death for decades. That canon is worth knowing, and we have covered some of it in our commercial advertisement examples roundup. But if you are briefing a TV or CTV spot this year, the more useful study set is recent work: ads built for viewers who hold a phone during the break, for streaming interfaces, and for campaigns that start on social weeks before the broadcast slot. So this list is nine spots from 2021 to 2026, every one verified against the brand’s own channel and a dated press source, in chronological order.
1. Channel 4, Super. Human. (2021)
Channel 4’s Tokyo Paralympics film opens on effort, not triumph. Paralympians bleed, vomit, swear, and grind through training while a reworked version of So You Wanna Be a Boxer from Bugsy Malone drives the cut. The joke of the title is the point: the film strips out the saintly “inspiration” framing that disability sport usually gets and replaces it with the mundane brutality every elite athlete lives with, alarm clocks, physio, crashes, a screaming baby at home.
The craft choice worth studying is tonal control. Director Bradford Young shoots the athletes the way prestige sports films shoot anyone else, which is exactly the argument the broadcaster wanted to make. Channel 4’s own press release confirms the first TV airing on July 16, 2021, and names the athletes on screen, including Kadeena Cox and Jordanne Whiley. Nothing in the film asks for sympathy, so the pride it builds feels earned.
Here is the full film from Channel 4’s own channel.
2. Uber One, Best Friends (2023)
Robert De Niro and Asa Butterfield sit on a film set. Butterfield tries small talk; De Niro quietly eats a delivery. The whole campaign hangs on one deadpan line of logic: they both eat food, and they both go places, so they are basically best friends. That absurdly thin premise is a precise product explanation in disguise, because Uber One is a membership for eating food and going places.
The lesson is casting as argument. The gap between a screen legend and a Netflix teen star is the joke, and the membership is the only thing that bridges it. Creative Salon covered the launch in October 2023, noting the campaign ran across TV, cinema, and digital in cuts from six seconds up. That matters for anyone planning a modern buy: the idea was engineered to survive being chopped into every length, which is a structural test I walk through in our guide to commercial length.
Watch the full-length film on Uber Eats’ official channel.
3. The Farmer’s Dog, Forever (2023)
A puppy and a girl grow up together. She goes to college, falls in love, moves, has a baby, and the dog is there for all of it, aging in the background of her life until the final line lands: nothing matters more than more years together. It was the fresh pet food brand’s first Super Bowl ad, and it beat every celebrity spot in the game. Adweek reported that Forever topped USA Today’s 2023 Ad Meter with a score of 6.56, the highest of the year.
What I would steal is the discipline of the product logic. The emotional engine, wanting more years with your dog, is literally the purchase reason for healthier food. Most tearjerker ads borrow emotion that has nothing to do with the product; this one earns it on-category, which is why the payoff feels honest instead of manipulative. It is the same structural honesty I look for in every brief, and the reason I keep this spot in my storytelling ads reference folder.
The spot is on The Farmer’s Dog’s official channel.
4. Tubi, Interface Interruption (2023)
For fifteen seconds during the Super Bowl, millions of people thought someone in their living room had sat on the remote. The broadcast appears to resume, the announcers chat, and then a Tubi menu takes over the screen and starts scrolling toward a movie. Couches erupted. The streamer built awareness by hijacking the one interface every viewer recognizes: their own TV.
This is the rare ad where the medium is the entire idea. It only works on a television, at that exact moment, at that scale of shared viewing, which is what makes it TV-native thinking rather than a repurposed online film. It was also a risk with a measurable payoff: Tubi’s own press announcement confirms the spot took home five Cannes Lions in 2023. If you want the mechanics behind stunts that get talked about, our breakdown of techniques that trigger virality covers the pattern.
Tubi’s official upload lets you relive the prank.
5. DoorDash, All the Ads (2024)
During Super Bowl LVIII, DoorDash promised to deliver one winner everything advertised in the game: the snacks, the candy, the cars, even the tax service. To enter, viewers had to catch a promotional code crawling across the screen in DoorDash’s own thirty-second spot and type it into doordash-all-the-ads.com exactly as it appeared, and the official rules called it a “lengthy promotional code” for a reason; the code was built to make people pause and rewind the broadcast. DoorDash’s own announcement laid out the sweepstakes ahead of the game, with Mike Diva directing and Laurence Fishburne narrating, and Marketing Dive covered the mechanics on February 1, 2024.
The lesson is participation as media. Most Super Bowl advertisers fight the second screen; DoorDash conscripted it, turning the phone in every viewer’s hand into the entry form and every other advertiser’s airtime into part of its prize pool. The product truth, that DoorDash delivers almost anything, becomes a game the whole broadcast plays along with instead of a claim in a voiceover. Juries noticed: the campaign took eight Lions at Cannes in 2024, including the Titanium Grand Prix, a run its media agency Wavemaker documented.
The thirty-second spot is on DoorDash’s official channel.
6. Google Pixel, Javier in Frame (2024)
Google’s Super Bowl spot follows Javier, a man who is blind, as he photographs his life: dates, a wedding, a dog, a baby. Much of the frame is blurred to suggest his sight, while the Pixel camera’s Guided Frame feature speaks to him, telling him when faces are in shot. Google’s own announcement confirms the ad was made with Adam Morse, an award-winning filmmaker who is also blind, and that the feature guides blind and low-vision users with audio cues.
The craft lesson is point of view as proof. Instead of a spec list, the ad puts you inside the user’s perception and lets the product’s voice interface be the only clear thing in the frame. That is a demo, technically, but it plays as a life story. For any brand with an accessibility feature, this is the benchmark: the feature is not a checkbox in the corner, it is the camera language of the whole film.
Made by Google’s channel hosts the spot.
7. Sainsbury’s, BIG Christmas (2024)
The BFG prepares a snozzcumber, decides Christmas deserves better, and recruits Sophie, a real Sainsbury’s colleague, to help him source the feast: salmon, sprouts, Stilton, straight from the supermarket’s suppliers. Stephen Fry narrates. Retail Gazette covered the debut on November 1, 2024, when the film premiered during Coronation Street after a same-morning digital release.
Two decisions make this worth studying. First, borrowing a beloved character solves the hardest problem in UK Christmas advertising, which is cutting through a season where every retailer airs an emotional epic; the BFG arrives pre-loved, so the film spends its runtime on warmth instead of setup. Second, casting an actual employee as the co-lead quietly carries the retail message, real people, real products, without a single line of corporate copy. The VFX scale is the spectacle, but the grounding is what sells groceries.
Sainsbury’s official channel has the full advert.
8. Lay’s, The Little Farmer (2025)
A little girl watches a potato truck pull away and spots one spud left behind on the dirt road. She plants it, shields it from storms with an umbrella, guards it overnight, harvests it, and places her potato on the next truck. Almost no dialogue; a gentle cover of All I Want Is You does the emotional work. Tasting Table’s coverage confirms the Super Bowl 2025 spot was directed by Taika Waititi and inspired by the real multi-generational farming families behind the brand.
For a snack brand that could easily have bought another celebrity gag, the move worth noticing is the supply chain as story. The product’s origin, potatoes grown by family farms, becomes a childhood fable, and the single chip bag at the end feels like a harvest instead of a logo slap. It is proof that “where the product comes from” can carry a whole spot when the filmmaking commits. The brand’s channel carries the campaign cut, and the game itself ran the long version.
Here is the spot from Lay’s official channel.
9. Squarespace, Unavailable (2026)
Emma Stone discovers that emmastone.com is taken, and a black-and-white gothic horror unfolds: candlelight, dread, smashed and burned laptops, madness. Squarespace’s newsroom announcement confirms the film was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, shot on black-and-white analogue film, and aired between the first and second quarters of Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026.
The study point is committing to an auteur instead of renting a face. Stone and Lanthimos have made three features together, and the ad plays like a miniature from their filmography rather than a celebrity endorsement. The product message, register your domain before someone else does, is about as dry as a utility pitch gets, and the film makes it primal by treating a lost domain as a lost identity. When the category is dull, raise the filmmaking, not the volume. That is also the ad I point to when clients ask whether craft still matters in a break full of noise; our TV commercial production guide covers what that level of execution actually involves.
The extended cut is on Squarespace’s official channel.
All nine spots compared
| Brand and spot | Year | Where it ran | The move worth stealing | Study it if you are making |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Channel 4, Super. Human. | 2021 | UK TV, social | Prestige-film tone instead of pity framing | Purpose or sports work |
| Uber One, Best Friends | 2023 | UK TV, cinema, digital | Casting gap as the product argument | Celebrity comedy that must cut down |
| The Farmer’s Dog, Forever | 2023 | Super Bowl | Emotion that is literally the purchase reason | An emotional brand film |
| Tubi, Interface Interruption | 2023 | Super Bowl | The TV interface as the idea | A stunt or awareness play |
| DoorDash, All the Ads | 2024 | Super Bowl plus digital | The ad break turned into a prize pool | A participation or sweepstakes idea |
| Google Pixel, Javier in Frame | 2024 | Super Bowl | The user’s point of view as the demo | A feature or accessibility story |
| Sainsbury’s, BIG Christmas | 2024 | UK TV, digital | Borrowed character plus a real employee | Seasonal retail spectacle |
| Lay’s, The Little Farmer | 2025 | Super Bowl | Supply chain told as a fable | An origin or provenance story |
| Squarespace, Unavailable | 2026 | Super Bowl | Auteur filmmaking on a dull utility | A category nobody finds exciting |
What the recent winners have in common
Reading these nine together, a few patterns show up that the classic canon does not teach.
The broadcast moment is one node in a longer arc. DoorDash’s spot was the entry key to a sweepstakes that lived on a microsite; Tubi’s stunt was designed for live second-screen shock; Sainsbury’s dropped online in the morning and on TV at night. If your media plan treats the TV slot as the only event, you are leaving most of the value on the table.
Sound-off legibility is now table stakes, but sound-on is where these ads separate. The Bugsy Malone rework in Super. Human., the folk cover in The Little Farmer, Guided Frame’s voice in Javier in Frame: in each case the audio carries real narrative weight. Plan the mix as early as the storyboard.
Every spot has exactly one device. A prank interface. A dog aging. A raised eyebrow of a premise stretched over two celebrities. None of them stack three messages into thirty seconds, which is the most common failure I see in first-draft scripts. And the budgets vary wildly; a two-hander on a film set and a VFX giant can sit on the same list because in both cases the idea earned the slot before the money did. If you are trying to scope what a given ambition level costs, our 30-second commercial cost breakdown puts real numbers on it.
Frequently asked questions
One device, executed completely. The strongest recent spots each commit to a single idea, a fake streaming menu, a dog aging alongside its owner, a lost domain played as horror, and cut everything that competes with it. Beyond the idea, the winners share three habits: the emotion connects to the actual purchase reason, the spot survives a six-second cutdown without dying, and the broadcast airing is treated as the finale of a longer campaign rather than the whole campaign.
Yes, but for the planning, not the budgets. Super Bowl spots like DoorDash's All the Ads show how a broadcast slot can anchor a much larger participation campaign, and that playbook scales down to a regional buy. What does not scale is spectacle for its own sake. The more transferable lessons often come from ordinary rotation work, like Uber One's Best Friends, which was built to run across TV, cinema, and digital in cuts from six seconds up.
Plan a 60 or 90 second hero film plus a full ladder of cutdowns, because a modern buy runs the same idea at 30, 15, and 6 seconds across broadcast and streaming. The practical test is to write the 6 second version first; if the core device does not survive that compression, the long film is probably carrying three ideas instead of one. Christmas epics and brand manifestos earn longer runtimes, but only when a single clear device holds the whole length.
