What the 40 Most-Watched YouTube Ads of the Past Four Years Tell Us

Good ads do more than celebrate creativity. They also show how advertising, and society, are changing.

In 2015, the 120 most-watched ads on YouTube took up a combined 30 million hours of people's time, or roughly 3,500 years.

Those 120 ads came from every month of 2015. Since 2011, YouTube has published a list of the 10 most-watched ads each month, and at the end of each year it compiles the 10 most-watched ads of the year.

On this year's annual list, the top ad came from the mobile game Clash of Clans, with 82 million views. An ad for South Korea's Hyundai came second with 69 million. Samsung, Budweiser, Adidas and Always also made the list, and many of them appear on it year after year.

One striking fact: even the last-placed ad on this year's list drew 30 million views, easily beating the top ad of 2012 by 10 million.

None of these ads were pre-roll or mid-roll spots inside other YouTube videos. Each is a standalone video on its own page. In other words, people chose to click through and watch ads that run three to four minutes.

This confirms, once again, that people do not hate ads. They hate bad ads, and we all know a bad ad when we see one.

Anyone who has watched Mad Men knows the rule its protagonist, Don Draper, believes in most: advertising is based on happiness. If an ad makes viewers link a product with happiness, it works.

That rule still holds, except that "happiness" has been stretched almost without limit. It no longer means happiness in the literal sense; it is closer to a value you believe in.

Take a few of this year's most popular video ads. Always's "Like a Girl" campaigns against gender bias; Budweiser's "Lost Dog" celebrates friendship; Dove's "Speak Beautiful" pushes back against online abuse. These ads are popular not because their ideas are especially clever, but because their message matches values their audience already holds.

Screenshot of the Always ad

And who would turn down a conversation with their own values?

Of course, values are one thing and creativity is another. When judging whether an ad is good, creativity is still the most important test.

These high-traffic ads all have strong creative ideas. We wanted to see what else they could tell us, so we extended the window back another three years.

The 10 most-watched YouTube ads of each of the past four years (40 in all) were all hits on YouTube, but YouTube did not create them. It only gave them a longer life. A truly good ad should be able to grab attention on any platform.

Here is what else we found. If you want to know exactly which 40 ads people abroad watched again and again over the past four years, you will find links at the end of this article.

YouTube's most popular ads are also Super Bowl regulars

Over the past few years, many of the ads played again and again on YouTube also ran during live Super Bowl broadcasts, in trimmed 30-second versions. In 2012, half of the 10 most-watched ads on YouTube were made specifically for the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl is the National Football League's annual championship game, played on a Sunday between late January and early February. In the United States it draws as much attention and talk as the Spring Festival Gala does in China. But as a major sporting event, its ratings are worth far more to advertisers than those of our Spring Festival Gala, so the price of a 30-second spot rises every year.

The joke goes that there are two kinds of Super Bowl viewers: those who watch the game closely, and those who watch the ads closely. Each year about 50 to 60 ads run in the breaks, all at steep prices. In 2012, a 30-second spot cost US$3.5 million; by 2016, the price had risen to US$5 million (more than 30 million yuan).

Because the game comes early in the year, the ads brands run during the Super Bowl largely set the tone of their marketing for the year ahead. And because the Super Bowl has high ratings and great reach, an ad in its breaks gives a brand the most exposure it can get in a single day. That is why advertisers will pay millions of dollars for just 30 seconds.

For the same reason, most Super Bowl ads are expensive and beautifully shot. Seen this way, it is no surprise they are popular on YouTube: if the most expensive ad a brand makes all year cannot hold consumers' attention, someone has some serious thinking to do.

Even the most popular ads cannot always rescue poor results

Among the 40 most-watched YouTube ads of the past four years are a few young companies, such as GoPro, Poo-Pourri (an air freshener brand) and fanpage.it (an Italian news site). But most come from giants in cars, fast-moving consumer goods and clothing. Nine ads came from car brands (Volkswagen, Audi and others) and 15 from consumer goods brands (Dove, Pepsi and others).

Among individual brands, Nike appears most often, with 4 of the 40. Volkswagen, Samsung and Budweiser tie for second with 3 each; Audi, Always and Pepsi made the list twice each.

Notably, apart from Nike, every one of these brands, including Volkswagen, Audi, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Samsung and Budweiser, saw slow or negative sales growth. Judging by their results in the year after these ads ran, the ads did little for them.

Screenshot of Budweiser's "Lost Dog" ad

Perhaps consumers have grown shrewder. They may share the values a brand shows in its ads, but they are pragmatic when they actually choose what to buy. The best example is scandal-hit Volkswagen. Its ads appeared three times on the lists of people's favorite ads over the past four years, yet its global sales in the first three quarters of 2015 fell 1.5% year on year.

This proves again that even the best ad can only make a good product look better. It cannot rescue a product in trouble. YouTube's ad rankings simply make that fact more visible.

The balance of power among creative agencies is shifting

Creative agencies on America's West Coast are slowly stealing the spotlight from Madison Avenue.

Among the 40 most-watched YouTube ads of the past four years, W+K, 72andSunny and Deutsch LA made the most, with 7, 3 and 3 ads respectively. All three have one thing in common: they are on the West Coast. (Deutsch is headquartered in New York, but the ads on the list came from its Los Angeles office.)

The best example is 72andSunny, founded only in 2004. The Los Angeles agency was named Agency of the Year by both AdAge and Adweek in 2013 and again in 2014. Its best-known work is for Samsung's Galaxy smartphones: "The Next Big Thing Is Already Here." In that 2012 ad, 72andSunny openly mocked the iPhone, and for a while the ad was one of the most talked-about things on the internet.

Screenshot from Samsung's "The Next Big Thing Is Already Here" ad

At the start of this year, Adidas handed its global creative business to 72andSunny. Ryan Morlan, the brand's vice president of brand communications, said one reason for the choice was the agency's work for Samsung. The choice paid off: this year, an Adidas ad made YouTube's annual list for the first time, and 72andSunny created it.

New York is still the center of advertising in the United States, and indeed the world. But the new force of agencies rising on the West Coast deserves attention.

Seventeen years ago, TBWA\Chiat\Day and Deutsch were the first to open offices in the Playa Vista area of Los Angeles. In the years since, more and more agencies have moved to the freer atmosphere of the West Coast, and Playa Vista, where they cluster, is now called "the Madison Avenue of Los Angeles." 72andSunny's Los Angeles office is there too.

In San Francisco, young agencies such as VB&P, Eleven and 215McCann are also rising fast. Their clients include Apple, Facebook and Google.

The rise of West Coast agencies is no accident. Technology has fundamentally changed how brands and consumers interact. Since YouTube arrived, a TV ad can live almost forever, and consumers replay brand ads again and again as if they were short TV episodes. Social media has also transformed how media agencies work. They once needed to deal with only a few national newspapers and magazines, the main TV networks and radio stations; now they must also deal with a long list of online media and social platforms.

West Coast agencies sit close to Silicon Valley's latest technology and have no shortage of creative talent in Los Angeles. Digital marketing is in their bones, and that does give them an edge over their New York rivals.

A glance at the most popular ads can tell you where the economy is heading

Advertising has always tracked the economy. When times are good, big companies spend freely on marketing; when times are bad, advertising is the first budget to be cut. The auto industry knows this better than any other.

In the first year after the 2008 financial crisis, total ad spending by the 100 US companies with the biggest marketing budgets fell 10.2% year on year, the largest drop on record. That year, US car sales fell by more than 1.3 million vehicles, and General Motors and Chrysler declared bankruptcy. Meanwhile, GM's ad spending in 2008 fell 14.9% year on year, and Ford's fell by more than 28%.

In 2012, the US economy recovered, and once again the auto industry was the first to feel the thaw.

That year, of the 7 US companies with the highest ad spending, 3 were carmakers and 1 was a car insurer. The same year, carmakers accounted for 5 of the 10 most-watched ads on YouTube.

In the years since, car ads have stayed regulars on YouTube's annual lists, but their number has held steady at one or two a year. When the economy is not swinging wildly, carmakers have no need to make such a show of themselves.

Screenshot of Hyundai's "A Message to Space" ad

One more fun story: in 2012, Honda made an ad called "Matthew's Day Off," which ranked fifth on YouTube's list that year. It brought back Matthew Broderick, star of the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, to recreate scenes from the movie. It was made with such care that many American viewers mistook it for the trailer of a Ferris Bueller's Day Off sequel.

Appendix: The most-watched YouTube ad of each year, 2012 to 2015

The most-watched YouTube ad of 2015, Clash of Clans "Revenge":

The most-watched YouTube ad of 2014, Nike "Winner Stays":

The most-watched YouTube ad of 2013, Evian "Baby&Me":

The most-watched YouTube ad of 2012, Nike "My Time Is Now":

Links

The most-watched YouTube ads of 2015: click here (requires a VPN in mainland China; same below)

The most-watched YouTube ads of 2014: click here

The most-watched YouTube ads of 2013: click here

The most-watched YouTube ads of 2012: click here

Cover image from Zhanku Hellorf Creative