Best TV adverts of all time

A good TV ad is something that you never forget. It's visually appealing, highly original, humourous, clever and often accompanied by a catchy tune. The best TV ads tend to move away from the ‘hard-sell' of traditional advertising by using entertainment pieces to attract attention both on and offline. Recently, one of the most famous ads of the 80s, The Red Car and The Blue Car Had a Race, was re-released by Milky Way and most of us remembered the words by heart. Meanwhile, in 2007, Dairy Milk's £6.2 million gorilla ad about a gorilla drumming to Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight" became an instant viral hit, boosting sales by 9% and improving public perception of Cadbury's by 20% according to market research firm, YouGov. Here, we pick out some of our all time favourites.

PEPSI - CINDY CRAWFORD (BBDO, 1991)



Pepsi's 1991 advert featuring the mind-bogglingly beautiful Cindy Crawford, pulling up to a gas station in cut off denims and a white vest top and drinking a can of Pepsi, is one of its most successful and well-remembered adverts of all time. In 2007, Pepsi released the same ad, featuring an older, but still stunning, Crawford (despite two children in the back of her car) and the slogan "some things never change." If you drink Pepsi, you will look (and last) like Cindy Crawford, the ad says, but we know it's lying.

CALVIN KLEIN - KATE MOSS AND MARKY MARK (Herb Ritts, 1992)



Back in 1992, when Kate Moss was making her name as one of the most famous supermodels of the 90s, Marky Mark (Mark Wahlberg) was making it as a rap star and Calvin Klein was at its most edgy and cool, the three teamed up to make an ad. Teenage girls swooned over Wahlberg's abs while Kate's career took off, but there was no chemistry between the two, according to Wahlberg, who later told ‘Nuts' magazine: "she kind of looked like my nephew. I'm more into curvy women."

DIET COKE - DIET COKE BREAK (Lowe Lintas & Partners, 1994)



Set to the music, "I Just Want to Make Love to You," sung by Etta James, this advert showed women whispering to each other that it was eleven-thirty before clustering around a window to watch a strapping topless builder (actor, Lucky Vanous) take his Diet Coke break. In 2007, after years of less successful advertising campaigns, Coca Cola brought back a new hunk in the form of Frenchman, Francois Xavier as a way of repositioning the brand with its traditional female fan base.

LEVI'S - MR BOOMBASTIC (Bartle Bogle Hegarty, 1995)



One of the classic 90s adverts, Levi's Mr Boombastic was a funny cartoon that showed a man using his new Levi 501 jeans to rescue a woman from a burning building via a telephone wire, before enjoying a passionate kiss. This he did to the sound of Jamaican-American singer Shaggy's hit single, Mr Boombastic, a grinding reggae cover which went onto achieve huge success in many countries, and no doubt helped sell a few pairs of Levi's.

STELLA - THE LAST WISHES OF A DYING MAN (Lowe, 2001)



Beer companies have a good track record when it comes to advertising and Stella is no exception. The Last Wishes of a Dying Man was one of a series of clever movie-like adverts that used the music score from French film, Jean de Floret, to set the scene for the story. This one shows a son asking his father if there is anything he would like before he dies. He requests a flower, then honey; his last wish is for a pint of Stella, but this request is one the son is unable to grant….

JOHN SMITH'S BITTER - NO NONSENSE WITH PETER KAY (TBWA, 2003)



One of a series of funny adverts by a beer company, John Smith's, featuring comedian, Peter Kay as a "No Nonsense" character who says it like it is. This ad shows Kay interrupting his mother vacuuming in order to pack her off to an old people's home, "Are you mad?" she says, "I'm 55." Tough, says Kay, "I want to put a snooker table in your bedroom and the kids are frightened of your moustache."

GUINNESS EVOLUTION (Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, 2005)



One in a number of adverts for Guinness, based around idea that "Good Things are Worth the Wait." This one traces man's evolution to the perfect pint, working backwards from three men's first pint of Guinness in the pub, down the evolutionary chain via neanderthal man, apes, fish, dinosaurs and through to little slugs drinking some muddy water. It scooped the Grand Prix prize for the best advert of the year in the 2006 Cannes Lion Advertising Festival.

CARLTON DRAUGHT - BIG AD (George Patterson and Partners, Young & Rubicam, 2005)



There have been a lot of quite self-reverential, big budget beer advertisements released over the years. Carlton Draught's "Big Ad" of 2005 aims to parody all these in an epic production, referencing The Lord of the Rings, that shows two armies, shot from above, charging each other while singing new lyrics ("It's a big ad. Very big ad. It's a big ad we're in… It's a big ad! Expensive ad! This ad better sell some bloo-oo-oo-oody beer!") to the classic, rousing melody of "Of Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

HONDA - CHOIR ADVERTISEMENT (Honda, 2006)



This impressive advert, for a Honda Civic car, employed the skills of The Hollywood Film Chorale Sound Effects Choir (now known widely as the Honda Choir) to produce the sound of various car noises, ie. windscreen wipers, squealing tires, driving over cobbles and fast acceleration, using only human voices. Conducted by Steve Sidwell, who is also the composer of the choir, the advert won The Gold Lion Award in the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival - and rightly so.

OLD SPICE - THE MAN YOUR MAN COULD SMELL LIKE (Wieden+Kennedy, 2009)



This advertisement, featuring actor Isaiah Mustafa reciting a smug monologue about how ‘anything is possible' if a man uses Old Spice shower gel, was written by Craig Allen and Eric Kallman and filmed using a single uninterrupted take, using minimal computer-generated technology. It shows Mustafa moving from a bathroom, to a sailboat to riding a horse all the while looking smooth and cool as a cucumber. "We're not saying this body wash will make your man smell into a romantic millionaire jet fighter pilot, but we are insinuating it," says the ad. Needless to say there have been many parody videos released, some of which are just as funny as the real thing.

Emily Jenkinson

14th April 2011