whether you're looking at your phone your laptop or the sky outside your window it feels like you can't turn your head without your eyes falling on another advertisement these days when a commercial pops up online we're all pretty quick to click on the skip add button but today we're going to look at the exceptions to the rule from death-defying game shows to shocking publicity stunts let's take a look at the ads that keep the customers watching as we check out advertising that's on another leve
l mcadvertisements ice cream is generally associated with a trip to the beach or a warm sunny day so when mcdonald's started marketing their cones in snowy sweden they had to think outside the box sweden has beautiful summers but in the winter it's another much colder story this mc advertisement uses this extreme environment to its advantage featuring a giant plastic ice cream cone that gradually fills up with real snow alongside text that tells the consumer it's never too cold for ice cream it'
s certainly a unique approach and if you threw a few sprinkles on that sundae might scale the billboard and have a taste the oversized ice cream isn't the only mcdonald's dish that's appeared in an unlikely place zurich city festival is one of switzerland's largest annual events and back in 2010 mcdonald's converted a swiss crosswalk into an ad for their world famous fries advertising their food to the hundreds of thousands of people that would attend the festival the crispy crosswalk was positi
oned right outside of mcdonald's leading festival goers directly to the golden arches although i'm not sure i'd want to eat fries after watching thousands of people trample all over them airborne advertising this next advert publicity stunt hybrid was designed to shock consumers into paying attention check it out it's a bird it's a plane it's movie advertising new yorkers are famously good at minding their own business but when these human figures started to soar over the big apple every cab dri
ver wall street banker and tourist was left looking at the skies unsurprisingly these flying creatures aren't real superheroes they're human-shaped remote-controlled planes created to promote superhero movie chronicle back in 2012 chronicle had a budget of just 12 million but the marketing team's use of cheap publicity stunts meant that the movie flew straight to the top of the box office grossing 126.6 million dollars now i'm just waiting for all famous movie makers to adopt this approach what
i wouldn't give to see spielberg scorsese and tarantino take him to the skies to advertise their new flicks molar marketing colgate is all about clean teeth and fresh breath so at annual events like oral health month the company typically give out free samples of their plaque purging products unfortunately crowds are never overly excited about the miniature tubes of toothpaste so in 2009 the company decided to go in the opposite direction handing out sweet treats to their customers giving out ca
ndy at oral health month feels a bit diabolical but all the sugary goods came with a secret message when the consumers finished eating the free products they discovered that the sticks carrying the candies were actually little wooden toothbrushes all carrying the same message don't forget this mildly threatening note reminded customers to brush their teeth and by trading dental floss for candy floss colgate managed to create a fresh advertising campaign that reached a large group of sweet toothe
d customers a cut above the rest there's only one thing professional soccer players like more than scoring goals getting their hair cut when brazil's main soccer league serie a banned alcoholic sponsorships on jerseys back in 2021 brazilian beer brand brahma had to think of a creative loophole to circumnavigate the rule they decided to capitalize on soccer's love of hair inventing a new hairstyle that resembled a glass of foaming brahma beer and marketing it to soccer fans on social media the ca
mpaign is an example of gorilla advertising a marketing style that uses surprising and unconventional methods to promote a product remarkably the haircut became so popular brazilian players started to wear it on the field offering brahma free advertising without breaking serie a's rules and regulations getting your customers to advertise for you now that's how you trim away any competition word in mouth let's shift gears cruising on from gorilla advertising to a roadside billboard an austrian re
st stop chain called old timer managed to create a billboard that's impossible to avoid turning an entire road tunnel into one gigantic advertisement the ad makes drivers feel like they're heading straight into a hungry diner's mouth promoting old timer's all-you-can-eat buffet as the woman chows down on an endless supply of fiat fries and porsche pies fireworks alfredo this next advertisement is a new year's billboard from barilla who said pasta la vista into 2010 by showing a cluster of spaghe
tti arranged to look like a new year's firework the simple explosive ad appeared on bus stops and billboards and campaigns like this earn barilla a pretty penny they're four billion dollars in annual revenue establishing them as the largest pasta company in the world kill boards from a tasty ad to one that's a little more gross this next billboard from insecticide brand orphia involves a collage of dead insects when it first appeared in 2013 the advertisement looked blank simply showing a can of
orpheus insect repellent however the advertisement was actually a giant fly trap the blank surface being covered in a layer of transparent glue as the hours and days went by the lights around the billboard started to attract thousands of mosquitoes and flies and as the insects hit the advertisement their bodies completely changed the image creating a dark spraying pattern out of the cans nozzle according to orpheu over 230 000 insects hit the billboard putting a dent in milan's insect populatio
n and showing why products like orpheus are necessary to keep the bugs at bay i know that successful businesses need to make sacrifices but i didn't realize sacrificing 230 000 flies was the key to corporate success real life sci-fi we've looked at a few innovative billboards so far but this next piece of futuristic advertising comes straight out of the science fiction movie cities around the world are now boasting 3d billboards hyper realistic advertisements that have been heralded as the futur
e of advertising these billboards are used to promote everything from tv shows to technology and no matter what they're displaying the 3d animations are bound to stop people in their tracks from the corner of the box-shaped billboard the forced perspective causes this high-definition kitten in tokyo to look ultra-realistic purring at pedestrians as they walk below however if you approach the billboard from a different direction that's one flat cat regardless from the right angle these awesome ad
s are pretty mind-blowing and frankly i'm happy to be hypnotized into buying and consuming endlessly if it's in fancy 3d form sneaky sponsorship fifa is one of the biggest video game franchises in the world so an advertising spot on one of their in-game virtual billboards can be pretty pricey reportedly costing up to five hundred thousand dollars burger king decided they wanted to have their logos feature in the game without spending the big bucks so the marketing team came up with an ingenious
campaign to get the job done burger king sponsored the real-life jerseys of stevenage fc a tiny soccer team at the bottom of england's fourth division stevenage weren't a popular team but they were featured in fifa 20 meaning that when burger king slapped their logo on stevenage's real kit their branding would automatically be found inside the game they then introduced the stevenage challenge online telling fifa fans that if they scored a goal with stevenage and shared it on twitter they'd win a
real edible reward on the burger king app the campaign was a whopper success and stevenage soon became the most played team on fifa over 25 000 goals were shared online and for the first time stevenage's jersey sold out in real life the marketing campaign cost burger king just fifty thousand dollars the dollar menu advertisement giving burger king a huge amount of exposure and briefly making stevenage the biggest team in online soccer a pixelated problem next up we have an advertisement from th
e wwf no not those guys the world wildlife fund an international organization that aims to protect endangered animals in 2008 they started a pixelated print campaign that looked like this it might look like the video is buffering but the number of pixels used in the images are the same as the number of individuals in the species that are still alive these prints showcase giant pandas cross river gorillas ethiopian wolves and japanese golden eagles and the more pixelated the image the closer the
species is to extinction the touching campaign gave a new definition to the term guerrilla marketing and today giant pandas are no longer classified as endangered animals meaning the vulnerable creatures can now be portrayed in slightly higher definition makeshift marketing when it came time to hire a new in-house graphic designer in 2018 the city of los angeles came across a unique problem who was going to design the job advertisement instead of paying for a freelance designer the social media
team decided to create the ad themselves and this is what they came up with the ad looks like it was made by a seven-year-old but the city didn't just hang little timmy's artwork on the fridge they shared it to twitter and the job advertisement went viral online it's unclear whether the ad was made by a child on microsoft pay or a secret genius who knew exactly what they were doing but the advertisement gained a ton of attention and the city ended up receiving some pretty creative applications i
f graphic design is these applicants passion i surely hope they didn't quit their day jobs creepy commercials a horror movie is only really scary if the viewer is totally immersed but the marketing team behind the release of the ring 2 took the pursuit of realism a bit too far in the ring the characters watch a haunted videotape and when the video ends they receive a phone call from a ghostly voice telling them that they're going to die in 7 days with the sequel marketing consultancy new media m
aze played into this storyline encouraging fans to visit a website and input a friend's email address and phone number the site would then send that friend an email with a link to watch the ring 2's trailer outline as the trailer played the friend's phone would start to ring and if they picked it up the spooky voice would whisper if someone pulled this trick on me i wouldn't leave the house for weeks but it turns out the campaign caused a ton of moviegoers to change out of their soiled pants and
head straight to the cinema with the ring 2 grossing 163.9 million dollars on a 50 million dollar budget a bloody good billboard in 2020 the bbc advertised their adaptation of dracula with a blood-curdling billboard in the day the billboard showed a plain white background stuck full of bloody wooden stakes a glass box sat on the street level meanwhile containing a single wooden stake providing pedestrians with a weapon in case of vampires luckily for the citizens of england vampires aren't real
right well you can always count on the count to come out at night and as the sun went down a single light shone across the painstakingly positioned stakes ingeniously creating the unmistakable shadow of a vampire looks like we might need that steak after all spanish for sips at first this looks like an ordinary vending machine sitting on a busy street in las vegas but whenever a pedestrian walks past the vendor automatically offers them a free can of corona's new hard seltzer lemonade on one sp
ecial condition [Music] this voice activated machine accepts espen only and if the customer tries to order in english it immediately rejects them asking them to repeat the order in spanish if they fail a few times the machine offers them a free subscription to duolingo plus a language learning app that allows them to learn enough spanish to finally get their drink the ad is a great way to pay homage to corona's mexican roots though as soon as they've drunk a few of those hard seltzers i'm willin
g to bet customers forget whatever spanish they learned coiled campaign back in 2010 the marketing team at copenhagen zoo crushed it creating an ad that's literally straight busting sorry i promise i'll never say that again this isn't a shot from a new disaster movie this is an advertisement for the zoo showing a boa constrictor coiled around a city bus and squeezing it tight as the bus snaked its way through copenhagen streets it was bound to attract some attention and copenhagen zoo went on to
become one of the most visited locations in denmark that year stellar work advertisement some of the advertising campaigns that we've looked at are arguably works of art but these print ads by french eyewear store belong in a gallery the company showed a set of impressionist paintings an art style that's famous for using dots and visible brushstrokes to create distorted versions of realistic images the advertisement shows somebody holding a pair of kelloptic glasses up to the painting and when
viewed through the lenses the famous paintings appear hyper-realistic the company using works from van gogh monet and serat to show how their glasses can improve your eyesight and turn an impressionistic world into a 4k photo way to make an impression rub me if you can back in 2005 3m gave a new definition to the term billboard creating a reinforced glass box and filling it with 3 million dollar bills the glass was strengthened by a layer of 3m's extra strong security film and the company placed
the box on a sidewalk in vancouver encouraging pedestrians to try and shatter the glass and take the money talk about trusting your product 3m shared images of several pedestrians kicking at the safety glass but the only things they broke were probably their toes and the money remained untouched it turns out the marketing stunt didn't just use reinforced glass it also used some smoke and mirrors it's since been revealed that there was only 500 of actual money inside the box carefully placed on
top of a stack of fake bills even though the stunt was cheap to produce it seemed extravagant and it led to a record number of orders for the security film and a few copycat campaigns that weren't as successful oh my god well maybe that was a little too hard sorry elon breaking the mold the meals shown in fast food advertisements are typically a long way away from the food that you actually pick up at the drive-thru but in 2020 burger king decided to break the mold literally starting an ad campa
ign that centered around images of a moldy whopper the tv commercial showed the burger progressively rot over the course of 34 days before finishing with an important message stating that the unappetizing mold is actually the beauty of no artificial preservatives the fungal feast proves that burger king uses natural ingredients in their whoppers while simultaneously making fun of mcdonald's drawing attention to the famous rumor that a burger from mickey d's will last forever without rotting just
look at this 12 year old mcdonald's cheeseburger preserved in iceland i am not loving it although associating food-based products with mold i'm not sure i'm loving that either bk gritty gamers to promote the launch of rise of the tomb raider on xbox one microsoft placed eight contestants on a huge billboard in london putting them through a test they called the survival of the grittiest the contestants could leave the billboard at any time but only the last remaining participant would take home
a prize a live audience on twitch controlled the conditions on the billboard subjecting the participants to artificially created blizzards downpours or sweltering heat the advertisement created a lot of buzz around the new tomb raider game and after 20 hours of survival only one challenger remained the champion was rewarded with a special vacation inspired by rise of the tomb raider and while full details about the vacation's location were never released if you've played tomb raider it doesn't s
ound like much of a reward it's hardly a trip to the bahamas two-in-one with their plastic pens lighters and razors french company pick make a ridiculous assortment of products back in 2015 the company decided to shave some money off of the marketing budget advertising both their razors and pens on one single ad this guy's clearly fallen victim to a horrible prank but he's got nothing to worry about able to shave off his ballpoint beard with his trusty bic razor these advertisements appeared ins
ide a magazine and interestingly they ran a page apart this meant that as a reader flicked through the magazine they'd pause on the second image thinking they were seeing the same ad twice in theory they'd then go back to the previous page playing an impromptu game of spot the difference as they made sure that they weren't seeing things this little bit of trickery is impressive but in my opinion they could have gone for a third all they had to do to advertise their lighters was set the guy's hai
r on fire knock off the knockoffs the world is full of thrifty sneaker heads donning shoes from brands like mikey calvin klein and abibas adidas decided to do something about the knockoffs releasing a series of ads and highlighted how real adidas sneakers are designed to offer you comfort and protection unlike poorly made fakes the company combined their famous three stripes logo with images of foot injuries showing that if you wear fake sneakers you're going to injure your feet and when it come
s to athletics it's three stripes or you're out bright ideas british newspaper the economist is all about serious journalism but back in 2005 someone in their marketing department had the idea of borrowing a trick from saturday morning cartoons the enormous light bulb in this ad contained motion sensors meaning that whenever a pedestrian starts to walk underneath the billboard let there be light the billboard conveys that the economist is all about intelligent journalism and bright ideas and alt
hough the newspaper generally covers complex issues and current affairs this advertisement proves that sometimes less is more billboard if i've learned anything today it's that coming up with an advertising campaign seems like a real headache but that's where pain medications like tylenol come in back in 2008 tylenol asked the team at j walter thompson to sugarcoat their pill creating an advertisement that would beat out the competition the team decided to depict a head-wrecking headache by buil
ding a fake crane and wrecking ball that appeared to be smashing through a man's forehead the attention-grabbing ad had a clear message the pillboard encapsulating what tylenol capsules are all about helping you when your head really really hurts a sensational sticker using a wrecking ball in your advertisement is pretty impressive but all pet care companies front line needed to advertise their business was a single large sticker from the ground the advertisement in jakarta indonesia must have s
eemed a little strange but when you viewed the giant sticker from a few floors up the unwitting pedestrians walking over the dog look just like ticks and fleas it's clear to see why the pup isn't wagging its tail and the image of human size ticks shows customers just how desperately an infected dog needs a dose of frontline's flea and tick spray maybe our pals at orphea can help too stationary stunts it turns out the smartest thing about smart cars aren't the cars themselves but the advertisemen
ts they use to market them smart cars are famously great at parking in tight spaces but they aren't exactly known for being fast so when the company released the sporty smart brabus back in 2007 they wanted their advertisements to focus on the car's speed so they made this happen when the bridge the car was advertised on opens up that's right this bridge and rotterdam is a basco bridge meaning it can open in the middle allowing the smart billboard to show the world the speed and power of the bra
vos as it flies over the river personally i don't think blasting a real bravos over the bridge would be the smartest thing to do but hey if an evil knievel wannabe tries to and inadvertently sinks their smart guard at the bottom of a river they could presumably sue smart for false advertising commercials miley is a german manufacturer of domestic appliances and when they release their new s8 vacuum cleaner in slovakia they wanted to prove that the product could vacuum up absolutely everything ev
en cars and trucks unlike the s8 the tunnel converting billboard definitely doesn't suck however after releasing images of the advertisement online melee revealed the billboard's big twist it never existed the company realized that building a real billboard was a waste of cash and they could achieve the same amount of publicity if they created a fake advertisement and posted it online millie used video editing software to place the fake billboard on top of the tunnel and whenever a truck drove p
ast they carefully masked the vehicle out placing it as a separate layer on top of the advertisement if you look closely the cut and paste commercial wasn't even particularly well done the blue sky bleeding into the billboard this feels pretty dishonest but annoyingly the ploy worked the ad gained a ton of attention as people debated whether the ad was real or fake all this attention meant that melee managed to make a successful advertising campaign with no media budget and i'd be pretty impress
ed if i didn't feel so betrayed the toughest toothpaste while marketing formula toothpaste in indonesia advertising agency ogilvian mather definitely knew the formula to making a great billboard formula's motto is build strong teeth and the advertisement represented this by showing a guy chewing straight through the ads metal scaffolding this simple illusion is created by using extra pieces of black metal bent and twisted into shape the advertisement received a lot of attention online with 9 out
of 10 tennis agreeing that the innovative billboard is minty fresh [Music] milk boy back in 2008 indian milk company anando created a marketing campaign that aimed to drag kids away from soda and water proving that drinking milk was the only way to grow big and strong this superhuman kid has clearly been hitting the milk bottle hard his calcium filled bones allowing him to move skyscrapers like jenga blocks the billboard was developed by mccann ad agency and it works by hanging over the edge of
the skyscraper its blue background blending into the sky behind it unfortunately some people online have pointed out that the billboard would only work on a sunny day and it would completely block the windows of four floors of the building this means that unfortunately the impractical concept was as far as my research can tell me never actually made that definitely spoils the campaign but there's no use crying over spilled milk and at least the billboard left us with our new favorite superhero
milk boy evil doers with lactose intolerance beware so that wraps up our rundown of clever advertisements what's the most effective advertisement that you've ever seen let me know in the comments below and thanks for watching [Music]
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