video Youtube: ads

Old Spice, Red Bull, and Bears Oh My! A look back at the last five years of ads on YouTube

Do you remember life before the Old Spice Man? Or the epic split that launched a thousand splits? Since launching our skippable TrueView video ads five years ago, we’ve had countless iconic moments from brands on YouTube. That’s because with our introduction of ads you can skip, brands have amped up their game and created videos that feel less like ads and more like content you want to watch. In fact, last year four of the top 10 trending videos of the year were created by brands.

To celebrate our fifth anniversary of our skippable TrueView ads, we’re bringing you back to 2010, with a look at the top five trending ads on YouTube from five years ago. Do you remember them all?

1) DC Shoes: “Ken Block’s Gymkhana THREE, Part 2; Ultimate Playground; l’Autodrome, France
DC Shoes took us behind the wheel with Ken Block on a track with banks as steep as 51 degrees—more than double the incline of most racecar tracks!

2) Old Spice: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
In 2010, Old Spice took the web by storm with their 'The Man Your Man Could Smell Like' campaign. Even funnier were the resulting real-time conversations that ensued with celebrities like Alyssa Milano.

3) Red Bull: Danny MacAskill - Way Back Home
Two years before Felix Baumgartner jumped from the stratosphere, Red Bull was still leading the charge on creating breathtaking HD ads.

4) Old Spice: Questions
The "Old Spice Man" became so popular that two of his videos were among the five most popular of the year - totalling nearly 75M views of both ads combined.

5) Tippex: NSFW. A hunter shoots a bear.
We'd be remiss not to give a shout-out to Tippex, who made white-out, of all products, a YouTube hit with their incredibly clever play on “choose your own adventure, YouTube style” in this ad.

But 2010 was just a starting point for great videos from brands. We’ve seen more creativity from brands on YouTube over the past five years, and as a result we’re watching more. In fact, the top 100 brands are now generating 42 percent more views per month on YouTube, according to Pixability.¹ And we're seeing great growth in new advertisers adopting video ads on YouTube--the number of advertisers using TrueView grew 45 percent in 2014² and all of the top 100 global brands have run TrueView video ads over the past year.³

To check out some of the most memorable ads on YouTube, take a look at our Iconic Ad Moments on YouTube playlist.

We look forward to see what brands will come up with this year!

David Kagan, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched "Volvo LifePaint."

1. Pixability Top 100 Brands report, March 2015; compares data from Feb 2014 to Feb 2015. Top 100 brands defined by Interbrand Top 100 Global Brands list.
2. YouTube global data, 2014. Top 100 brands defined by Interbrand Top 100 Global Brands list.
3. YouTube global data, 2013 vs. 2014

And this year’s top ads on YouTube are...

It used to be that the great ads of the year were released during the Big Game. One day a year, we were treated to funny, touching, and memorable ads during the game that we rewatched online afterward (remember The Force or the Old Spice man?).

Today, brands have stepped up their game on YouTube and are creating videos that people seek out and choose to watch, every day. So what were the top ads of 2014? Well, we took a look at the ads that debuted on YouTube in 2014, and evaluated them against metrics including audience engagement metrics (watch time, likes, shares), video views, and audience retention metrics (how much of a video people watched) to come up with our leaderboard of the top ads of 2014 on YouTube.

Thanks to the creativity of this year’s videos, people are spending more time watching videos from brands than ever before. In fact, we watched more than 1 billion minutes of the top 10 ads this year alone. And while the top ads are nearly 50 percent longer this year compared to last—averaging around 3 minutes each—we stayed tuned longer, spending around 50 percent more time watching them.

Here are the ads that grabbed our attention in 2014:

To celebrate this year’s top ads around the world, we teamed up with Kurt Hugo Schneider to remix them into an original video to the tunes of YouTube creators Scott Bradlee, Taylor Davis, Mike Relm, and Michael Thurber. You can watch it here:

You can also catch up on all the top ads individually by checking out our playlists for the Top Trailers, Top Brand/Creator Collaborations, and Top Sports Ads of 2014. For more on the top ads lists for the year, visit Think with Google.

Alyson Yaffe, YouTube Marketing, recently watched “Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens Official Teaser Trailer #1 (2015) - J.J. Abrams Movie HD.”