10 Best YouTube Ads and What They Do Well

The best YouTube ads win the viewer’s first five seconds, and everything else follows from that one fight. The ten below all solve it differently: a founder talking straight into a camera in a warehouse, a cartoon owl joking about your guilt, a twenty minute documentary people chose to keep watching.

I run Moonb, a dedicated creative team that makes video ads and brand films for marketing teams, and this is the list I come back to whenever a brief says “make it go viral.” Every entry is a real ad you can watch right now on the brand’s own channel, and each one is embedded below. No view count folklore, no campaigns that only exist in marketing decks. I checked every upload before writing a word about it, because half the “best ads” lists online describe films that were quietly deleted years ago.

1. Dollar Shave Club, “Our Blades Are F***ing Great” (2012)

Still the reference point for direct response on YouTube more than a decade later. This is the original upload.

A warehouse, a founder on camera, and a joke that lands before you have time to wonder whether this is a real ad. Michael Dubin talks straight to the lens, names the problem, and makes the brand feel like a person before it feels like a company. By the time the product promise arrives, you have already accepted the tone, and that is half the battle in a skippable slot.

Shaving ads at the time chased aspiration: slow motion water, glossy skin, chrome bathrooms. This one used a cramped setting and plain language, so the brand read as honest rather than polished, which is exactly what a direct to consumer launch needs. When founders ask me to recreate this energy, the thing that usually goes wrong is the polish. They shoot the scrappy script on a cinema camera with three point lighting, and the joke dies. The roughness is load bearing.

If your product has a clear pitch, the first five seconds should sound like a human who already knows why the viewer is here. That instinct matters more than any of the techniques that trigger virality; this ad earns attention through voice, not noise.

2. Google, “Year in Search 2024” (2024)

Google’s annual Year in Search film is the montage every brand tries to copy in December. This is the 2024 edition, from Google’s own channel.

The format is almost embarrassingly simple. Real queries appear in the search box over footage of the year that prompted them. The product never gets explained, because the product is the action; you watch people ask the world questions at the exact moments they needed answers.

That is the lesson for any brand whose product solves small, repeated moments: show the moment of need and let recognition do the work. Google does not try to make search look heroic. It shows search as a quiet reflex, which fits the brand far better than any abstract claim about information would. The montage structure also lets one film move through dozens of contexts without feeling scattered, because the search bar holds everything together as a through line.

I lean on the same principle in storytelling ads: the viewer has to see the problem before they will care about the answer.

3. Slack, “Animals!” (2015)

Slack’s first big TV push was a sixty second spot about a team of animals pulling off an ambitious project together. It is still on Slack’s channel.

The premise sounds absurd, and it is, but look at what the absurdity buys. Because the team is a cast of animated animals, there is no fake meeting room and no actors pretending to type. The spot jumps straight to the thing Slack actually sells, and the upload’s own description says it plainly: send less email, have fewer meetings.

Software ads get vague the moment they say the word collaboration. This one stays concrete by letting you watch coordination happen. That is the trade worth studying: give up realism, get clarity. For a workflow product it is usually the right trade, since the audience needs to understand how the tool behaves, not who sits at the desk.

I collected more patterns like this in our roundup of SaaS video ads, and the weak ones almost always fail the same way: they describe a workflow instead of letting you watch one.

4. Apple, “Detectives Solve the Mystery with 8x Zoom” (2025)

Apple sells the iPhone camera by shooting small films with it. This one, made for the 8x zoom on the iPhone 17 Pro, plays as a detective story first and a camera demo second.

The useful move is delay. Apple does not push the spec into the first frame; it lets the footage carry the claim, so the feature feels proven by what it captured instead of explained by a list. The detectives crack the case because the camera can reach that far, and the gag only works because the camera trick works. The demo is the punchline. The one number Apple allows itself, an equivalent 200mm focal length, sits in the video description, not the film.

This fits because the camera is the product. Front load the technical explanation and you flatten the response. Let the film play and the viewer experiences the tool through its output, which is much closer to how people actually judge a camera. For any team selling a visible capability, the move is the same: bury the feature inside something people would watch anyway, then let the credit land at the end.

5. Metro Trains Melbourne, “Dumb Ways to Die” (2012)

A rail safety message from a metro operator became one of the most watched pieces of advertising ever on YouTube, now past 350 million views on the campaign’s channel.

Nobody wakes up wanting to watch a safety announcement. So Metro Trains hid one inside a catchy song and a parade of jelly bean characters dying in progressively sillier ways, and the actual message does not surface until the final beat. By then you have hummed along for three minutes.

The move to steal is the sugar coating, and the discipline behind it. The song is a real, complete song. The animation commits fully to its cuteness. The safety point arrives once, at the end, without a lecture. When organizations with unloved messages try this, the failure I see most is half commitment: two verses of joke, then a nervous pivot to policy language at the forty second mark. Half odd is worse than fully odd. If charm is the delivery vehicle, it has to run the whole route.

There is a longer breakdown of this species of ad in our animated advertisements guide.

6. Duolingo, “Duo’s Work Day” (2023)

Duolingo’s owl works because it says the thing users already feel. This mockumentary about where the reminder notifications come from has more than 30 million views on Duolingo’s channel.

The brand never pretends language learning is easy or that its push notifications are subtle. It jokes about the guilt, the streaks, the vaguely menacing reminders, and that honesty is what keeps the mascot useful instead of annoying. The joke starts with the pain, not the payoff. If someone feels bad about a missed lesson, the ad meets them there and turns the moment into a brand behavior.

Consistency is the underrated part. The voice stays a little mean, a little playful, and very aware of the learner’s actual experience; it never drifts into generic positivity. For any habit based product, this is the reference point. When users already know the struggle, you do not need to invent one. Name it clearly, wink, and move on.

7. Squarespace, “The Singularity” (2023)

Squarespace’s Super Bowl film stars Adam Driver discovering that Squarespace is a website that makes websites. The extended cut lives on their channel.

One meta joke, produced like a prestige science fiction trailer, repeated until it folds in on itself. That is the whole ad, and it is why people remembered it in a Super Bowl full of celebrity cameos. The premise is legible in the first ten seconds; after that, the production value turns a one line gag into a spectacle.

What I would take from it has nothing to do with the production spend. It is the ratio: one idea, full commitment, zero subplots. Big stage ads die from addition, a second joke, a third celebrity, a feature list stapled to the ending. Squarespace picked a single sentence a viewer could repeat at work the next morning and spent every dollar making that sentence bigger.

8. Grammarly, “Write the Future” (2017)

Grammarly’s long running pre roll formula is a before and after you can see at a glance. This spot from the campaign has been on their channel since 2017.

A sentence appears, gets cleaned up, and the improved version lands in a real context: an email, an application, a post. The rhythm makes the product legible even if you are half watching, which is the realistic assumption on YouTube. You can see the difference without studying the screen; the ad demonstrates the value in place instead of asking you to infer it.

The tone is deliberately measured. Grammarly wants to sound like a serious tool for work communication, because the stakes are an email to your boss or a proposal to a client, and reliability is the whole promise. For any writing or editing product this is the template: show the messy version, show the fixed one, keep the voice calm. The calmer the correction, the more credible it feels.

Also worth noticing: this was engineered for the skip button. The transformation starts almost immediately. Watch the first five seconds twice; nothing is wasted.

9. GoPro, “Best of 2024” (2024)

GoPro’s year end reels are ads assembled almost entirely from customer footage. Here is the 2024 edition from GoPro’s channel.

GoPro’s content system works because the brand lets the camera disappear behind the action. Surfing, cliff jumps, wingsuits; the footage comes from the person doing the thing, so the product feels embedded in the experience instead of demonstrated at it. The curation is the craft. Every clip does two jobs at once: it shows what the camera sees and proves what its owners do with it.

The reason this beats a spec ad is trust. The audience gets motion and point of view immediately, with no setup, and no claim about stabilization is as convincing as footage that obviously survived the mountain. If your customers can create proof more believable than your own claims, your job shifts from production to editing.

We wrote about when that trade makes sense in our UGC video guide; GoPro is the maximal case.

10. charity: water, “The Spring” (2020)

The outlier: a film just under twenty minutes long that charity: water has run as a YouTube ad, now past 40 million views on their channel.

“The Spring” tells the story of founder Scott Harrison, who walked away from a nightlife career, reset his life, and built an organization around one promise: clean water. Instead of describing a global crisis from a distance, the film follows one person’s unlikely path into it, with documentary structure, interviews, and real field footage. The length only works because every beat adds a layer; nothing in the middle idles.

That is the honest requirement for long form: earn the next thirty seconds, every thirty seconds. Most brands should never make a twenty minute ad. But every brand can borrow the core move, which is choosing a person to follow instead of an abstraction to explain. Audiences remember one man’s story more easily than a mission statement, and a donation makes more sense once you have followed somebody all the way to the field.

If you are weighing lengths for your own campaign, we broke down the format limits in how long YouTube ads can be.

The ten ads side by side

Ad	Brand goal	The move to steal	Watch out
Dollar Shave Club, “Our Blades Are F***ing Great” (2012)	Launch a challenger brand	Talk like a person and lead with the joke	Shooting a scrappy script too pretty kills it
Google, “Year in Search 2024” (2024)	Brand affection at scale	Show the moment of need, let recognition work	Montages scatter without a through line
Slack, “Animals!” (2015)	Make an abstract product legible	Trade realism for clarity	Saying “collaboration” while showing nothing
Apple, “Detectives Solve the Mystery with 8x Zoom” (2025)	Prove a camera feature	Make the demo the punchline	Front loading the spec sheet
Metro Trains Melbourne, “Dumb Ways to Die” (2012)	Make an unloved message watchable	Commit fully to the sugar coating	Half committed humor reads as confusion
Duolingo, “Duo’s Work Day” (2023)	Keep a habit product top of mind	Joke about the feeling users already have	Mascots drifting into generic positivity
Squarespace, “The Singularity” (2023)	Big stage awareness	One repeatable sentence, everything behind it	Adding a second idea
Grammarly, “Write the Future” (2017)	Convert half attentive viewers	A before and after visible at a glance	Value the viewer has to infer
GoPro, “Best of 2024” (2024)	Prove capability with community proof	Curate customer footage into the ad	UGC without ruthless editing reads as filler
charity: water, “The Spring” (2020)	Drive donations through story	Follow one person instead of explaining an issue	Long form that idles

What I would borrow from these ads

The pattern is consistent. The first five seconds decide whether the viewer stays, so the ad shows its hand fast. Some do it with personality, like Dollar Shave Club and Duolingo. Some do it with a visible problem or transformation, like Google and Grammarly. Some make a system tangible through motion or curation, like Slack, Apple, and GoPro. And two of them earn attention by refusing to look like ads at all: Dumb Ways to Die and The Spring.

For direct response, reveal the pitch before the skip point; voice can carry it, or a transformation the viewer can see. For product education, put the product inside the action rather than explaining it from outside. For awareness, make the tone unmistakable before the message fully unpacks, because tone is what people can recall a week later.

Format follows the job. Decide what the viewer must understand in the first five seconds, then build around that single requirement. If the idea needs one image, make it a bumper. If it needs a sequence, every extra second has to earn itself with a new beat. If it needs trust, let a real person or real footage carry the weight. My team plans every cut this way now: name the one thing the opening must prove, then argue about everything else second.