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 police officer chugging a tallboy in a moving squad car, 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. Liquid Death, “Safe for Work” (2025)

Liquid Death sells canned water that looks like beer, and its 2025 Super Bowl spot is the sharpest version of that one joke. This is the upload on Liquid Death’s channel.

Police officers drink on shift. Flight crew crack cans mid-flight. Surgeons, judges, school bus drivers, everyone visibly enjoying what reads as a cold one at the worst possible moment, shot and scored like a big dumb beer anthem from decades ago. The alarm you feel is the whole engine, and the resolution is the product: it was water the entire time.

The move worth stealing is total commitment to a misread. The ad never winks early, never flashes a disclaimer, never softens the setup. It lets you sit in the wrong interpretation until the reveal does the selling. Most brands would panic-test this and sand the discomfort off; the discomfort is the ad. If your product’s whole point is a contrast (looks like X, is actually Y), build the film so the viewer experiences the contrast instead of being told about it. That beats chasing techniques that trigger virality; the tension is native to the product, so the attention converts.

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. Airbnb, “Same Room” (2023)

Airbnb’s “Get an Airbnb” campaign, launched in 2023, makes its case against hotels with miniature animated worlds instead of real rooms. “Same Room” is the spot I show people first, from Airbnb’s channel.

A group of friends squeezes into one cramped hotel twin room, rendered as a tiny isometric diorama. Then the set flips and unfolds into a tall townhouse with floors, a kitchen, a roof terrace, one person doing yoga in the morning sun. Nobody says a word about inventory or square footage. The transformation is the argument.

Software ads and travel ads share a disease: the moment they say “space” or “flexibility,” they go vague. Animation fixes it here the same way it fixes abstract products, by making the difference visible in one cut. That is the trade worth studying: give up realism, get clarity. The miniature style also sidesteps the stock-footage sameness of every other travel ad, so the campaign is recognizable from any single frame. There are more of this species in our animated advertisements guide; the strong ones all let you watch the claim instead of hearing it.

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 product announcement, 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. Sandy Hook Promise, “Just Joking” (2023)

Nobody clicks on a school safety announcement, which is why Sandy Hook Promise keeps hiding its message inside formats people already watch. In this PSA from September 2023, the format is a stand-up special.

Comedians including Wanda Sykes, Billy Eichner and Margaret Cho work a live room, and the audience laughs along, because the delivery says joke. Then the film reveals that the punchlines were real threats made by school shooters before their attacks, and the laughter curdles into the point: threats get dismissed as jokes, and dismissing them costs lives.

The move to steal is using the format itself as the argument. The audience on screen mishears threats as comedy, which is exactly the mistake the PSA wants you to stop making, so the reveal does not need a lecture attached. When organizations with unloved messages try something like this, the failure I see most is half commitment: a joke and a nervous pivot to policy language at the forty second mark. This film commits all the way to the comedy club, then turns once, at full force. If a disguise is your delivery vehicle, it has to be a real disguise.

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 lives 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. Software brands struggle with this discipline more than most; our roundup of SaaS video ads is largely a study in who managed it and who did not.

8. Volvo, “For Life” (2024)

A four minute car ad about a crash that never happens. Volvo released “For Life” in September 2024 for the EX90, shot by Hoyte van Hoytema, the cinematographer behind Interstellar and Oppenheimer. It is on the Volvo Cars channel.

A man learns he is going to be a father, and the film runs forward through the life ahead: birthdays, arguments, ordinary kitchen mornings, all of it framed as the future that exists because a car’s sensors reacted in one street moment. The safety technology never gets a diagram. It gets a consequence.

Most spec-led categories advertise the feature and hope you infer the stakes. Volvo inverts it: dramatize the stakes so completely that the feature becomes the quiet hero of somebody’s whole biography. That is an expensive version of an idea any team can borrow for very little. Write down what your product prevents, then film the life in which the bad thing never occurred. It also shows that length is a creative decision, and on YouTube nobody cuts you off at thirty seconds; a film this patient could not exist as a TV buy.

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, still up 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
Liquid Death, “Safe for Work” (2025)	Big stage awareness for a challenger	Commit fully to the misread, resolve with the product	Winking early kills the tension
Google, “Year in Search 2024” (2024)	Brand affection at scale	Show the moment of need, let recognition work	Montages scatter without a through line
Airbnb, “Same Room” (2023)	Win a comparison against hotels	Make the difference visible in one transformation	Saying “more space” 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
Sandy Hook Promise, “Just Joking” (2023)	Make an unloved message land	Let the format itself commit the mistake you are naming	Half committed disguises read 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
Volvo, “For Life” (2024)	Sell a safety feature	Film the life the product protects, not the spec	Emotion with no causal link to the product
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 a jolt of wrongness, like Liquid Death and Sandy Hook Promise. Some do it with a visible problem or transformation, like Google and Airbnb. Some make a capability tangible through what it captures or prevents, like Apple, GoPro, and Volvo. And two of them earn attention by refusing to look like ads at all: Duo’s mockumentary 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.