Fifteen video ad examples worth watching, from Dollar Shave Club to Coca-Cola, with the one technique to steal from each and a faster way to make your own.
15 Video Ad Examples to Study and Steal From in 2026
I have skipped thousands of video ads with my thumb already halfway to the next post. The ones that stopped me had something in common, and it was almost never the budget.
So I pulled the ads I keep coming back to and watched each one again with a notebook open. This is that list: 15 video ad examples you can actually watch, grouped loosely by the job each one does. Some are famous (Dollar Shave Club, Old Spice, a Coca-Cola film that broke the internet). Most are recent work from teams shipping ads at volume right now, including a few I had not seen written up anywhere else.
For each one I point to a specific moment on screen, explain why it works, name one technique you can copy this week, and flag where it falls short. It is built for marketers, founders, and anyone who has to make an ad next week and wants to see good before they make their own.
What makes a video ad worth copying
These are the lenses I used to pick the 15. They are weighted for ads, so a hook and a clear payoff matter more than production polish.
A hook in the first three seconds
On a feed, the first two to three seconds decide everything. The strongest ads put the idea, the tension, or the face on screen before anyone can scroll. A slow logo intro is a donation to the next advertiser.
One message, said once
The best ads I watched make a single point. Cramming three benefits into 30 seconds reads as zero benefits. If you cannot say the ad's job in one sentence, the viewer cannot either.
A reason to feel something or laugh
Humor and emotion are not decoration. They are the delivery vehicle that gets the message past someone's ad radar. The ads people quote years later almost all made them feel a specific thing.
Format that fits the platform and length
Awareness ads tend to land at 15 to 30 seconds, social ads often shorter, and a story-driven brand film can earn 60 to 90 seconds if every second moves forward. The medium dictates the cut, not the other way around.
Brand woven into the idea, not bolted on
In the ads that stuck, you could not remove the product without the story collapsing. The weak ones treated the brand as a sticker slapped on at the end.
Built to be made again (and tested)
This one is new to 2026. Volume now beats single big swings for most performance teams, and AI tooling is the reason. LinkedIn saw a 310% increase in AI-generated video content in 2025, and the AI video generator market sat around $788.5 million in 2025. The ads that win the year are usually the ones a team could ship 40 versions of. Thesparkhouse
Quick picks
- Best low-budget proof of concept: Dollar Shave Club (one room, one script, a category built)
- Best single-take craft: Old Spice, "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like"
- Best personalized ad at scale: Videoimagem for AB InBev (50,000+ unique videos)
- Best for performance testing: Favoured (10 to 15 UGC variants a month became 100 in a morning)
- Best localized ad: trivago (one brand face, 30 markets, no reshoots)
- Best B2B explainer: Slack, "So Yeah, We Tried Slack"
- Best big-idea brand film: Coca-Cola, "Masterpiece"
15 Video Ad Examples and Why They Work
1. Dollar Shave Club: the launch video that built a company
Start here, because almost no ad has ever returned more on so little. You can still watch Our Blades Are Great (2012, about 1:33).
The whole thing is one continuous tracking shot following founder Michael Dubin through a warehouse, talking straight to camera in a flat, sarcastic deadpan. Watch the moment he stops under a giant banner reading the title line and says the blades are so good "your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade." A toddler shaves a man's head behind him. None of it is explained.
Why it works: the script does the selling, not the production. The humor carries a brutally clear value proposition (good razors, a couple of bucks, mailed to you) and the low budget reads as honesty, not as a limitation. It pulled in roughly 12,000 orders in two days.
What to steal: write the script first and make it specific and funny enough that cheap looks like a choice. A confident presenter and a single take can outperform a polished shoot. You can build the presenter side of that with an ai spokesperson.
Where it falls short: this voice is hard to repeat. The sequel videos never hit the same way, and copycats usually land as smug rather than funny.
2. Videoimagem: 50,000 ads, each one made for one person
Brazilian agency Videoimagem ran a personalization play most brands talk about and never ship. The approach is documented in Videoimagem's AB InBev campaign.
For AB InBev's BEES ordering app, they produced over 50,000 personalized videos, each addressing a bar or shop owner by name with promotions tied to that customer's purchase history. For the consumer side, the Zé Delivery campaign used avatars of retired Rio de Janeiro soccer players to greet customers about their favorite team. The reported lift was up to 3x engagement.
Why it works: relevance beats production value. A video that says your name and your team is watched differently than a generic spot, even when it runs longer.
What to steal: treat the script as a template with variable slots (name, last order, location) and generate the versions, rather than filming one ad and hoping it fits everyone. This is where HeyGen's API and voice cloning did the heavy lifting for them.
Where it falls short: personalization needs clean data plumbing. Without a reliable database feeding the variables, the same engine produces 50,000 awkward mistakes.
3. Old Spice: 33 seconds, one impossible take
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like (2010, 0:33) is a masterclass in escalation, and the craft is the point.
Isaiah Mustafa opens with "Look at your man, now back to me," then the camera pulls back and he steps off a bathroom set onto a boat, then onto a horse, in what looks like a single unbroken move. "I'm on a horse" is the button. The transitions were done in-camera, which is why it still feels like a trick worth rewatching.
Why it works: the absurdity escalates on a tight clock, and the ad never forgets it is selling body wash to the woman buying it. Old Spice reported body wash sales roughly doubling by mid-2010.
What to steal: pick one device (here, the never-cut camera move) and push it to the edge. A single strong constraint creates more memorability than ten clever ideas competing for attention.
Where it falls short: this depends on a charismatic performer and precise production. Reproduce the format without the timing and you get a list of non-sequiturs.
4. Favoured: the same ad, a hundred ways, before lunch
This is the ad workflow that quietly changed in 2026, and the UK performance agency Favoured is the clearest example. The details are in Favoured's creative testing story.
Favoured runs UGC-style ads for clients like teapigs, Avon, and Kodak. They went from producing 10 to 15 creative variants a month to 50 to 100, generating AI avatars to read different script angles for the same product. One of their editors, George, put it plainly: eight months earlier he could make about 20 videos in a day, and now he made 100 in a single morning.
Why it works: performance marketing is a search problem. More shots at a hook means you find the winner faster and replace it before fatigue sets in.
What to steal: stop betting on one perfect ad. Generate a batch of script variants, ship them, kill the losers fast. Casual, direct-to-camera ai ugc video is the format that blends into feeds.
Where it falls short: Favoured is honest that the avatars are raw material, not a finished ad. Their co-founder noted that a skilled editor still has to cut them against B-roll, because you cannot type a prompt and get a perfect execution yet.
5. trivago: one face, thirty languages, no reshoot
Most localized ads either re-cast per market or settle for subtitles. trivago kept its actual brand character in every market instead. The work is shown in trivago's ad localization story.
trivago operates in 190+ countries. Localizing its "Mr. trivago" TV spot across 30 markets the old way meant finding one performer who could credibly speak many languages, plus months of post-production fixing accents. Creative Director João Laureano's team used AI avatars and translation to keep the same on-screen face across all the languages at once, cutting post-production time in half and rolling the ad into 15 regions inside three months.
Why it works: brand consistency. A traveler in Spain and a traveler in Poland see the same character, not two different actors pretending to be the same brand.
What to steal: decide localization at the script stage, not as a subtitle bolted on later. One source ad can become a campaign in dozens of languages with the speaker's look preserved.
Where it falls short: AI dubbing still trails a native performer for right-to-left languages and fine regional dialect, so the highest-stakes markets may want a human pass.
6. Volvo Trucks: the product demo disguised as a stunt
The Epic Split feat. Van Damme (2013, 75 seconds) is the rare ad that is secretly a spec sheet.
It opens on Jean-Claude Van Damme's face at dawn, voicing over "I've had my ups and downs." The camera pulls wide to reveal him standing with one foot on each of two trucks reversing in parallel, slowly extending into a full split between their wing mirrors, set to Enya's "Only Time." It was shot in a single take on a runway in Spain.
Why it works: every second is a live demonstration of Volvo Dynamic Steering's stability. The stunt is the proof, so the entertainment and the product claim are the same thing. It cleared 59 million views in four weeks.
What to steal: find the dramatic version of your product's actual capability and stage it. A real demonstration beats a list of features. The same instinct drives a good product demo video.
Where it falls short: this needed a budget, a star, and physical logistics. It is also a long watch by 2026 feed standards, built for a different viewing context.
7. Reply.io: a founder's face, posting daily
Not every ad is a campaign. Sometimes it is a CEO who suddenly posts every day without filming anything, which is what Reply.io built on TikTok.
In 2023, founder Oleg Campbell wanted a social presence but had no time to film. His social team built a lifelike avatar of him and used it to publish daily TikToks about sales and AI. Their most-viewed clip hit 5.7 million views, others landed between 8,000 and 30,000, and his following grew to 200,000 in 10 months. Their social manager noted they had no viral videos until they started this.
Why it works: a recognizable human face plus consistency. The algorithm rewards daily posting, and most executives cannot sustain a daily shoot.
What to steal: pick one person to be the brand's face, then remove filming as the bottleneck so you can post on a real cadence. Vertical, captioned, native-looking clips win the feed.
Where it falls short: an avatar of a real founder only works with that founder's genuine buy-in, and audiences can sour fast if it ever feels like the person is hiding behind it.
8. Slack: the B2B ad that admits the product is boring
So Yeah, We Tried Slack (2014, about 2:30) is the explainer every SaaS team should study before scripting their own.
It opens with Sandwich Video's founder deadpanning that his company ran fine on email and Dropbox, then his team narrates their pre-Slack chaos: emailing one colleague, texting another, holding meetings in a utility closet. The pivot is one line, "So yeah, we tried Slack," that flips the whole video from problem to solution.
Why it works: it dramatizes the pain before it shows the product, so by the time you see the interface you already want it. The self-deprecating tone makes a workplace tool feel human.
What to steal: structure the ad as problem, then turn. Spend the first half making the viewer feel the mess. Earn the product reveal. A script-led marketing videos approach fits this format well.
Where it falls short: at over two minutes it is built for a landing page or a curious prospect, not a cold feed. The cut you run as an ad needs to be far shorter.
9. Ogilvy: an ad you finish yourself
Ogilvy's work for Milka turned a chocolate bar into a tool, and it is one of the more inventive uses of AI video I have seen. The campaign is detailed in Ogilvy's Milka story.
Built on the Dutch saying "if you can't say it, sing it," the "Let Snelle Sing It for You" campaign let anyone buy a Milka bar, scan a code, and write down a feeling. Three AI engines then produced a personalized song delivered as a video: lyrics in the style of Dutch rapper Snelle, his cloned voice, and an avatar performance with matched lip-sync.
Why it works: it converts the audience from viewer to participant. The ad is not watched, it is co-created, and the output is a gift the user sends to someone else.
What to steal: ask whether your ad could produce something the viewer makes and shares. Participation travels further than a passive view, and voice plays a bigger role than most ads use it for.
Where it falls short: an interactive build like this carries real technical and moderation overhead. It is a campaign, not a Tuesday post, and a celebrity license raises the stakes.
10. Coca-Cola "Masterpiece": the big swing, done well
When a brand has nothing new to announce, it can still make you feel something, which is what Masterpiece (2023, about 2 minutes) does.
A bored art student is slumped in a gallery. An arm reaches out of a neo-cubist painting to grab Warhol's "Large Coca-Cola," and the bottle then travels canvas to canvas, through Turner's "The Shipwreck," until Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" cracks it open and passes it to the student. It was made partly with AI, and the official cut has drawn millions of views.
Why it works: it ties a 137-year-old brand to art history and creativity without a single product feature. The idea is the spectacle, and the craft earns the runtime.
What to steal: a brand with full awareness can sell a feeling instead of a fact. If you have no news, give people a reason to enjoy the brand. Many of these visuals are now reachable with an ai video generator and generative B-roll.
Where it falls short: this is a sequence almost no one has the budget or brand equity to pull off. Attempt it small and it reads as pretentious rather than playful.
11. Attention Grabbing Media: a small shop going global, fast
For most agencies the limit is not ideas, it is throughput. The Florida agency AGM hit that wall and got past it, as shown in AGM's localization story.
AGM localizes content for clients like the wellness brand NaturalSlim, built around health educator Frank Suarez. Using AI translation plus what they call "thumb-stoppers" (sharp opening visuals), they cut production from three days to a matter of hours and expanded into 10-plus new language markets, opening up European audiences they could not reach before.
Why it works: speed compounds. When a localized ad takes hours instead of days, a small team can serve markets that used to need a production house per region.
What to steal: separate the message from the language. Lock the script, then spin localized cuts, so a new market is a same-day task rather than a new project.
Where it falls short: faster output raises the stakes on quality control. A mistranslated health or finance claim scales just as fast as a good one, so a native reviewer is not optional.
12. Tomorrow.io: a five-person team that punches up
A lean B2B marketing team has no room for slow video, so Tomorrow.io rebuilt how it makes it. The setup is described in Tomorrow.io's marketing story.
The weather-intelligence company's marketing team is five people. They created AI avatars of executives, including the CMO, to send personalized account-based videos to high-value prospects, then repurposed one recording into product explainers, social posts, and email clips. Their marketing director chose HeyGen over Synthesia specifically on avatar quality, and a strategist said she could not imagine doing it with a traditional setup.
Why it works: it lets a small team produce executive-level video without booking executives' calendars, and it turns one asset into a week of content.
What to steal: get one strong recording of a real leader, then slice and personalize it across formats and accounts instead of starting from zero each time.
Where it falls short: executive avatars are best for B2B outreach and thought leadership, not splashy consumer spots. The format is functional more than cinematic.
13. Vision Creative Labs: from two videos a year to sixty a day
This one is about pure volume, and the numbers are hard to argue with. The story sits in Vision Creative Labs' case study.
The agency makes content for finance and DeFi brands, where explaining complex products quickly is the whole game. Clients went from publishing one or two videos a year to 50 to 60 a day using avatars and scripted content. Co-founder Roger described showing friends a clip of his own avatar and watching them refuse to believe he had not filmed it, then realizing he could record an ad's worth of content from a car or a beach.
Why it works: it removes the studio as a dependency, so output is limited by ideas and scripts rather than logistics.
What to steal: if your bottleneck is filming, kill the filming step. The same explainer logic that serves finance content works for any product that is hard to describe in text.
Where it falls short: at extreme volume, quality drift is the risk. A real review step matters more, not less, when you are shipping dozens a day.
14. Publicis Groupe: personalization used to say thank you
Personalization usually means a sales pitch. One of the most-shared examples I found used it for the opposite, and it came from an advertising holding company that knows the craft. See Publicis Groupe's campaign.
After a strong 2023, Publicis built a digital avatar of CEO Arthur Sadoun and sent roughly 100,000 personalized thank-you videos to employees, each in the person's name and native language, referencing their interests. The team framed it as making every individual feel seen, not as a tech demo.
Why it works: scale and intimacy are usually opposites, and this collapsed them. A message that knows your name and language reads as personal even when 100,000 others got one too.
What to steal: personalization is not only for conversion. The same engine that powers a personalized ad can power gratitude, onboarding, or a customer milestone, and those land because no one expects them.
Where it falls short: this is internal and relationship-driven, not a product ad. Used carelessly, mass personalization can feel hollow rather than warm, so the writing has to earn it.
15. AI Smart Ventures: turning words into multilingual video
The last one is for teams sitting on a pile of written content they have never turned into video. AI Smart Ventures did exactly that, as covered in AI Smart Ventures' story.
The agency converts blog posts and product pages into video and scales those into 170-plus languages and dialects, which lifted both website traffic and engagement for clients. Their contact summed up the strategy: teams keep telling clients to add video, and this made actually doing it far easier.
Why it works: most brands already own the message in text. Converting it to multilingual video unlocks search and social reach that a written page never gets.
What to steal: audit your best-performing written content and turn the top pieces into short videos before writing anything new. The script is already done.
Where it falls short: a blog post repackaged literally can feel flat. The strongest conversions rewrite for the ear and the feed, not just paste the article into a teleprompter.
All 15 Video Ad Examples Compared (At a Glance)
How to make video ads like these
A pattern runs through all 15: format follows function, and the cheapest version that holds attention usually wins. Dollar Shave Club proved a script beats a budget. Favoured and Vision Creative Labs proved that, in 2026, volume and testing beat the single big swing for most performance teams.
Here is the part that changed. Several of these formats (the personalized ad, the UGC variant, the localized cut, the founder talking head) no longer need a shoot. They can be built from a script in a browser, which is why the named teams above use HeyGen. Type the script, pick or clone a presenter, generate, then ship.
Match the starting point to the format. For a straight promo or social spot, start with marketing videos or an ai ad maker. For casual creator-style ads, use ai ugc video. For a recognizable face across formats, build ai avatars. To take one ad into new markets, run it through an ai video translator. Across their customers, HeyGen reports up to 70% lower production costs, against the $5,000 to $20,000 and two to four weeks a single traditional spot can take.
The honest caveat: this is the wrong tool for some of the ads on this list. You cannot generate Volvo's runway stunt or Coca-Cola's gallery film, and avatars can still feel slightly off on long, emotionally heavy storytelling, so a real crew wins there. AI dubbing also trails a native performer on right-to-left languages and fine dialect. Use it for the 90% of ads that are a person talking to a camera with a clear point, and shoot the hero film when the idea demands it.
The takeaway
Treat this less as a hall of fame and more as a menu. Match the example to the job in front of you: a founder monologue for a scrappy launch, a UGC batch for performance testing, a localized cut for a new market, a stunt film only when the idea truly earns it. Then build the smallest version that does the job, and make more of what works.
If you want to try the approach behind most of the recent examples here, HeyGen's free plan lets you turn a script into an ai video ad without a camera. Start with one, then test ten.
FAQ
How long should a video ad be?
It depends on the platform and the goal. For awareness and most social ads, 15 to 30 seconds is the common range, and feeds like TikTok and Reels often reward 6 to 15 seconds. Story-driven brand films can run 60 to 90 seconds if they hold attention. Whatever the length, the first two to three seconds carry the most weight.
What makes a video ad effective?
A hook in the opening seconds, one clear message, and a reason to feel something or laugh. The strongest ads tie the brand into the idea so you cannot remove the product without the story collapsing, and they end with a single obvious next step. Old Spice and Dollar Shave Club both do all three.
How much does it cost to make a video ad?
A traditional marketing spot often runs $5,000 to $20,000 and takes two to four weeks, since you are paying for talent, crew, studio time, and editing. AI-generated ads built from a script change that math: teams in this list report cutting production cost by up to 70% and shipping in hours, which is what makes high-volume testing affordable.
Can you make a video ad without a camera or actors?
Yes, and many ads on this list were made that way. Tools like ai avatars generate a presenter who reads your script, so you skip filming entirely. Tomorrow.io's five-person team and Reply.io's founder channel both run on this, producing presenter-led ads without booking a shoot.
What are the best types of video ads to test?
For performance, UGC-style talking-head ads tend to feel native in feeds and convert well, which is why Favoured generates dozens of variants. For awareness, founder or executive videos build trust, personalized ads lift engagement, and localized cuts open new markets. The smartest move is testing several angles of the same product rather than betting on one.
How do I make ads for TikTok and Instagram?
Shoot or generate vertical (9:16), keep it under 15 to 30 seconds, lead with the payoff, and add captions for sound-off viewing. A creator-style, direct-to-camera look outperforms a polished brand spot on these platforms. Reply.io grew to 200,000 TikTok followers with exactly this format.
How do I run the same ad in multiple languages?
Localize at the script stage rather than adding subtitles at the end. AI translation with voice cloning can keep your brand's face and voice consistent across markets, which is how trivago ran one spot across 30 regions and AGM expanded into 10-plus languages without per-market reshoots.
