THE BEST ADS OF 2023

It’s time to wrap up 2023, so let’s take a look at the year’s best commercials. Popular TV commercials come in all shapes and sizes, and for all manner of brands, products and services.

Take a closer look at the best from Adland, courtesy of the following brands:

McDonald’s – Raise Your Arches

When you want an off-beat ad, which director would you turn to? McDonald’s went with Edgar Wright, the director behind films as diverse as Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver. If you’ve seen the latter, you’ll know how crucial music is to the director, and the ‘Raise Your Arches’ ad is no different.

Because the key thing about Wright’s ad is that the product – McDonald’s – doesn’t feature at all. Instead, hungry office workers raise their eyebrows at each other to the beat of Yello’s 1985 hit, ‘Oh Yeah.’ The track’s most famous previous outing was in cult slacker hit Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

A worker puts a Post-it with an ‘M’ onto her colleague’s screen, before raising her eyebrows, kick-starting an entire office de-camp to the home of the Golden Arches for their lunch break.

Leo Burnett UK and Moxie Pictures were behind the concept. The agency said, ‘We were beyond excited to work with the brilliant Edgar Wright to bring this idea to life – from the visual look and feel he creates to what he does with music and choreography, he’s got that knack of making work that grabs your attention for all the right reasons.'

Coca-Cola - Masterpiece

Are commercials art? Well, Coca-Cola’s ‘Masterpiece’ definitely made the case for them to be under consideration. An art student is in a museum, looking uninspired and on the verge of nodding off, when suddenly, a Picasso/Braque-style Cubist portrait by French artist Aket comes to life. Its arm reaches out and across to a neighbouring wall, which features Andy Warhol’s ‘Large Coca-Cola’.

The ice-cold bottle of Coke is then tossed around the canvases (and a large classical sculpture), taking on their particular styles as it goes. Warhol is joined by Munch’s ‘The Scream’, ‘The Shipwreck’ by Turner, a Hiroshige and a Van Gogh. These are interspersed with pieces by up-and-coming artists from around the world, such as Stefania Tejada, Vikram Kushwah, Fatma Ramadan, Wonder Buhle, and Aket, before Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ finally flips the cap off and places the bottle onto the student’s bench. A quick slurp, and his charcoal flies across his sketchpad – with a cheeky wink from Vermeer’s ‘Girl’ to finish up with.

Directed by Academy Films’ Henry Scholfield, who’s best known for creating music videos for Ed Sheeran, Stormzy (‘Vossi Bop’) and Rosalia, several of the artworks were shot in live action as part of their extended sequences; plus the spot also makes use of ‘cutting-edge AI’, according to Ajab Samrai, global CCO at Blitzworks, the agency that created the campaign.

The soundtrack of sprightly and dramatic orchestral music is performed by the Budapest Scoring Orchestra.

Vanish – Me, My Autism and I

‘Making clothes last longer matters for us all, but for some it really matters’. Whilst many of us are aiming to keep our clothes in good condition for environmental reasons and as a corrective to ‘fast fashion’, Vanish’s ad had a deeper social purpose. The winner of this year’s Channel 4 Diversity in Advertising Award shone a light on the importance of key items of clothing for autistic people.

Vanish teamed up with Havas London and Ambitious about Autism to create their impactful docudrama film, produced by SMUGGLER London and shot by Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech). The film aims to spark conversation and awareness around autism in girls.

Research reveals that 73% of autistic people use clothes to help regulate their senses, and 75% say keeping the look, smell and feel of clothes the same is important to them.

Fifteen-year-old Ash is shown navigating home and school life, and the challenges she faces. A key part of her feeling secure is her favourite black hoodie and we’re shown how much it upsets and unbalances her when her sister ‘borrows’ it.

In terms of representation, not only is Ash in the film autistic, but her real-life family and friends appear beside her. Director Tom Hooper revealed that, ‘everything in the film is based on Ash and the family’s experience of living with autism. The script was completely rewritten to reflect their lived experience and we used improvisation on set throughout so that I could capture their voices.’

The soundtrack brings together both sound effects and music. The film starts off with a distorted humming, backgrounding the anxiety of what would seem to be a straightforward morning schedule of getting up, out of the house and to school. There’s music on the radio in the car as Ash’s mum drives her two daughters and a friend of Lily’s to school, which Ash asks her to turn off, as the noise in the car is clearly upsetting her. As other sequences at school play through, the background music is unobtrusive and level, but with a slightly melancholy edge. It becomes unsettling when Ash accuses Lily of taking her hoodie and they fight, before expanding to sound more calming and positive at the end, where Ash is shown enjoying a class.

Burger King – We Give Up

McDonald’s aren’t the only fast-food brand to use humour in their campaigns this year. Ad agency BBH cooked up a tongue-in-cheek story for Burger King – released as part of the promotion for Burger King’s official Chicken Royale Day – an event on 7^th June where the Home of the Whopper offered fans a Chicken Royale for just £1 via the Burger King app.

However, gone are the days of showing a gorgeous grilled chicken fillet landing on a bed of lettuce – instead, this is a counter-intuitive retro whizz through decades of marketing for the Whopper and its home, with a groovy soundtrack to match (we defy anyone not to have the 60s-style ‘Whopper, Whopper’ refrain bouncing round their brain for hours afterwards). The jingle gives way to jazzy hi-hats for the 70s, and classic 80s synths.  Our ‘hero’ travels through carefully created streets from the 1960s to the 2020s, bombarded by Whopper ads wherever he looks, only to get to the counter and order… a Chicken Royale. ‘We give up’, runs the tagline, as the jingle changes to a 60s ‘Royale, Chicken Royale’ refrain.

Soco Núñez de Cela – Brand and Communications Director at Burger King, said, ‘At Burger King, we’ve hero-ed our iconic Whopper for decades. This year, we wanted to flip the status quo and celebrate a fan favourite, the Chicken Royale instead.

Greenpeace

Greenpeace brought heavyweight voice talent on board for their campaign film, highlighting the shocking extent of the threat to ocean health, and the dangers and stresses our oceans are facing.

In the animation, Camila Cabello voices an eel, trying to help Jane Fonda’s determined flying fish to reach safety and clean water. The pair encounter plastics, deep sea mining, industrial fishing nets and dead fish on their journey. The flying fish ends up on her own, after mistakenly following debris that looks like the eel, before being rescued and helped out of the murk to the sanctuary of clean waters by a friendly whale, voiced by Mission Impossible actor Simon Pegg, a longtime Greenpeace supporter.

The ad finishes with Pegg’s voiceover, highlighting that, ‘our oceans are under threat and time is running out. World leaders finally agreed a Global Ocean Treaty that can protect the oceans, our home. Now they must use this Treaty to create ocean sanctuaries where marine life can recover and thrive.’

Fiona Nicholls of Greenpeace’s Protect The Oceans campaign said: ‘Ocean sanctuaries provide relief from the growing threats that sea creatures face from climate breakdown, pollution and overfishing. But as well as giving wildlife and ecosystems a fighting chance, they sustain the billions of people who still get nourishment and a livelihood from the ocean.’

Just Eat

Just Eat have become famous for their celeb-filled ads – from Snoop Dogg to Katy Perry, their campaigns are full of fun, wit and OTT styling. In what could be the hottest collab of the year, pop icon Christina Aguilera and rising rapper Latto are the delivery service’s latest stars.

The dining divas team up in a baroque mega-mansion (complete with its own canal and super-glam gondola) in a fusion of hip hop and opera, incredible costuming, elaborate choreography, hordes of orange-clad delivery dudes and Christina’s lung-busting vocals causing a vast chandelier to shatter.

From Thai salad to tacos, sushi delivered by a dinky train (Yo Sushi, can we have one of these at St Pancras while we’re waiting for the Eurostar?), mezze to macarons and acai to iced coffee, the message is that there’s way more to Just Eat than fast food. With everything from premium dishes to groceries, the carefully crafted lyrics also reflect the rise in demand for food delivery in non-traditional takeaway moments, including breakfast, brunch and lunch.

The amazing choreography was done by legendary hip hop choreographer Hi-Hat, who’s worked with the likes of Rihanna and Jay-Z.

John Lewis – Snapper: The Perfect Tree

What do you get when you cross Little Shop Of Horrors with Andrea Bocelli? John Lewis’ 2023 Christmas advert, Snapper: The Perfect Tree. Following last year’s heart-warming ad The Beginner, Saatchi & Saatchi’s surreal spot tells the story of Alfie, a small boy who buys a mysterious ‘Grow Your Own Perfect Christmas Tree’ kit from a flea market.

Come Christmas morning, little Alfie is sad watching Snapper alone outside, and takes a gift out to open alongside the giant plant. Alfie is soon followed by the rest of his family with their presents, which Snapper gobbles up and spits out, each magically unwrapped. The moral of the story is summed up in the advert’s tagline, “Let your traditions grow.”

Set to the jaunty strains of Andrea Bocelli’s operatic original ‘Festa’, this is also the first John Lewis advert in years not to foreground a stripped-back acoustic cover, owing to the brand changing their creative agency this year from long-term partners Adam & Eve/DDB to Saatchi & Saatchi.

The ad was directed by French collective Megaforce, who have previously done some beautiful, inventive work for Burberry. Will it be one of the most memorable Christmas adverts 2023? Only time (and, we suspect, sales of cuddly Venus flytrap toys at John Lewis), will tell…

Deep Dives

Can’t get enough great ads? Check out our deep dives on the dark art of subliminal advertising; a selection of ads that stirred up controversy; the history of women in advertising, and our pick of the best ads from last year.

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