Gym Fails And Doll Bails: 5 Ads You Should Watch Right Now

Every week, Unruly searches far and wide for the best online video advertising to offer, and serves it up in a handy list.

This time round, rapper Drake loses a fight with some equipment for Apple Music, Ram returns to its sentimental roots and Morton Salt headlines the latest (and madly ambitious) new OK Go video.

We also have a couple of saccharine sweet holiday spots from McDonald’s and Apple.

Enjoy!

5. Apple Music – Drake vs. Bench Press

Apple’s bold push into comedic campaigns continues unabated with its new Drake spot for Apple Music. Following up the gloriously silly ‘Taylor vs. Treadmill’, the ad uses the same concept to humiliate another musical megastar. Let’s just you’ll probably never hear Swift’s song ‘Bad Blood’ the same again.

With its new comedic turn, Apple has clearly taken a page from its collaborator James Corden, expertly making celebrities look silly and human to the delight of viewers.

4. Morton Salt – OK Go: The One Moment

Few advertising franchises have greater expectations to live up to than OK Go’s music video output. Over the course of a decade, the Chicago indie rock band have carved out a unique niche for themselves by producing some of the world’s most eye-catching brand-sponsored set pieces ever committed to YouTube.

Morton Salt is their sponsor for ‘The One Moment’, a genuinely marvellous visual feast which uses exploding paint cans and slo-mo to stunning effect. Even after all these years, OK Go show no signs of resting on their laurels.

3. Apple – Frankie’s Holiday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFPcsYGriEs

This festive season, Apple jumps on to the sentimental campaign bandwagon with a spot featuring an unusual star: Frankenstein’s monster. While you’d assume the ad would be more suited to a Halloween release, the brand uses the infamous creature to tell a story about love and acceptance during the holidays.

While comedian Brad Garrett dons the iconic neck-bolts to play ‘Frankie’, the real star is the iPhone 7, which provides some backing music for his understandably-gruff singing.

2. Ram – Praise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVlgTkYXWik

A spiritual sequel to Ram’s legendary Super Bowl ad ‘Farmer’, the brand’s new campaign hits the same elegiac notes. Another ode to the American working class, the spot shows men and women breaking their backs at various blue-collar jobs, from mining to service to the factory line.

In the three years since ‘Farmer’, Ram hasn’t lost its sense of poetry, and the closing lines perfectly summarise its mission statement: “Praise the workers. Praise the work”.

1. McDonald’s – Juliette The Doll

McDonald’s gets all ‘Toy Story’ for its latest Christmas ad, telling the story of a lonely doll whose loneliness is complicated by the fact that her shop overlooks a bustling McDonald’s franchise. While it’s certainly a familiar trope, there is a certain old-school charm to ‘Juliette the Doll’, as snow-swept families browse for presents on a street festooned with fairy lights.

In fact, it may make you wish for a world in which Christmas preparations were as simple as going to McDonald’s and finding an errant toy hiding in your bag. We can dream…