In 2015, the 120 most-watched ads on YouTube took a total of 30 million hours, or about 3,500 years.

The hundreds of ads come from every month of 2015 - since 2011, YouTube has posted the 10 most viewed monthly ads per month and summarized the top 10 annual ads at the end of the year.

In this year's annual list, the most-watched ads came from the mobile game Clash of Tribes, which received 82 million views, with South Korea's Hyundai coming in second with 69 million, and brands such as Samsung, Best, Adidas and Always, many of which are regulars over the years.

An interesting fact is that even the last ad on this year's list had 30 million total viewers, easily surpassing the number one ad on the list in 2012, with a difference of 10 million.

You know, these ads aren't pre-aired or interspersed in YouTube videos. Instead, they are all individual videos that are independently paged. That is, people are willing to point into these pages and watch these ads that are between 3 and 4 minutes long.

This again illustrates the problem, people do not hate advertising, just hate bad advertising, about what is bad advertising, we should all understand.

Anyone who's seen the American drama Mad Men knows that one of don Draper's most believed principles is that advertising is based on happiness - if an ad allows viewers to connect its products to happiness, it's a successful one.

The rule still hold today, except that the boundaries of "happiness" have been infinitely broadened - it is no longer literal, but more like a value you identify with.

Take some of this year's most popular video ads: Always's "Like a Girl," which promotes the elimination of gender bias, BestWeiser's "Lost Dog," celebrating friendship, Andreu's "Tell Beauty," which resists cold violence in Internet language. These ads are popular not because of how creative they are, but because their thrust is closely tied to the values that consumers identify with.

Always ad screenshots Always ad screenshots

And who would refuse to talk to the values they identify with?

Of course, values are one thing, and advertising creativity is another. Creativity is the most important criterion when judging the merits of advertising.

These high-click ads are undoubtedly creative, and we wanted to see what they could tell us other than good ideas, so we pushed this time period forward another three years.

The top 10 YouTube ads of the year (a total of 40) have been sought after on YouTube over the past four years, but YouTube itself hasn't spawned these high-quality ads - YouTube has only extended their life and vitality. A good advertisement should be attractive on any platform.

We have many more discoveries, summarized below. If you're interested in knowing which 40 ads have been seen and seen by "wrong nuts" over the past 4 years, you can find links at the end of the article.

The most popular ad on YouTube is also a guest of the Super Bowl

Over the past few years, many of the ads that have been aired over and over again on YouTube have also appeared in the Super Bowl live stream (in a 30-second lite). In 2012, half of the 10 most-watched ads on YouTube were specifically for the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl, the NFL's annual championship game, is held one Sunday between late January and early February. Its topicality and popularity in the United States is equivalent to the status of "Spring Festival Evening" in China. But as a high-profile sporting event, the ratings are much higher than our Spring Festival Evening Gold, so its advertising costs are increasing every 30 seconds.

Some joked that there were two kinds of people watching the Super Bowl. One is to seriously see the game, the other is to seriously look at advertising. Every year, about 50 to 60 ads appear on the Super Bowl broadcast, all of which are expensive. In 2012, the ad offer was $3.5 million per 30 seconds, and by 2016 that number had risen to $5 million (more than 30 million yuan).

As the event was in its early years, advertisers advertised at the Super Bowl, essentially set the tone for the brand's marketing in the coming year. In addition, the Super Bowl has high ratings and influence, so ads placed on the sidelines of the event are also the peak number of exposures a brand can achieve in a single day. That's why advertisers are willing to spend millions of dollars in exchange for just 30 seconds of exposure.

That's why most of the ads the brand produces for the Super Bowl are expensive and well-shot. From this point of view, the "Super Bowl" ads that are being sought after on YouTube have become understandable:If one of the biggest ads in production throughout the year doesn't capture consumers' attention, it's really something to reflect on.

Popular advertising can sometimes not save poor performance

Of the 40 most-watched ads on YouTube over the past four years, most still come from giants such as goPro, Pou-pourri (air freshener brand) and fanpage.it (Italian news site). Of these, 9 ads came from automotive brands (Volkswagen, Audi, etc.) and 15 from FMCG brands (Dove, Pepsi, etc.).

Of the single brands, Nike was the most frequently listed, accounting for four out of 40; Volkswagen, Samsung and Best Drive tied for second place with three ads; and Audi, Always and Pepsi Were each ranked second.

Notably, with the exception of Nike, other brands, including Volkswagen, Audi, Procter and Gamble, Pepsi, Samsung and BestWeiser, have experienced slow or negative sales growth. In terms of the brand's performance in the year after advertising, these ads also did not play a big role.

A screenshot of a Berwick ad for a "Lost Dog" ad

Perhaps consumers are smarter than ever: they may agree with the values that brands present in advertising, but they are pragmatic in actually choosing products. The best example is the scandal-plagued Volkswagen, whose global sales fell 1.5% year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2015, even though its ads appeared on the list of favorite ads three times in the past four years.

This also proves once again: no more high-quality advertising can only add to the product, want to rely on it in the snow to send carbon? Difficult. And YouTube's advertising list amplifies that fact.

The voice of advertising creative companies is changing

Advertising and creative companies from the West Coast of the United States are slowly taking away Madison Avenue.

In the past four years, of the 40 most viewed ads on YouTube, W.K., 72andSunny, and Deutsch LA contributed the most ideas, accounting for seven, three, and three, respectively. The three creative companies have one thing in common: they are located on the West Coast (Deutsch is based in New York, but the advertising ideas on the list come from its Los Angeles company).

The most representative is the 72and Sunny, which was established only in 2004. The Los Angeles-based creative company became AdAge and Adweek's Creative Company of the Year for the second year in a row in 2013 and 2014. Its most famous idea came from a collaboration with Samsung Galaxy smartphones, The Next Big Thing Is Here Already. In this 2012 ad, 72andSunny explicitly snubbed Apple's phone, and its idea made the ad a hot topic on the Internet.

Photo A screenshot from Samsung's "Next Big Thing Is Already Here" ad

Ryan Morlan, vice president of brand communications at Adidas, which took over the global creative business to 72andSunny earlier this year, says one of the reasons for choosing 72andSunny is to look at the ideas it's doing for Samsung. This has proved to be the right choice. Because this year, for the first time, Adidas's ads made YouTube's annual ad list, and the idea came from the company.

True, New York remains the center of advertising creativity in the United States and around the world, but the new power of advertising companies on the West Coast of the United States deserves attention.

In the years since TWBA,Chiat-Day and Deutsch first opened offices in the Playa Vista area of Los Angeles 17 years ago, more and more creative advertising companies have moved to the more liberal West Coast, where playa Vista is now known as "Madison Avenue in Los Angeles." 72andSunny's Los Angeles office is also located in the area.

In San Francisco, young creative companies, such as VB-P, Eleven and 215 McCann, are also emerging, serving customers including Apple, Facebook and Google.

The rise of West Coast advertising creative companies is no accident.Technology has fundamentally changed the way brands and consumers interactAfter YouTube, television advertising beed almost permanent, consumers began to return brand ads as many times as TV sera then; the rise of social media fundamentally changed the strategy of media agencies. In the past, they might have had to handle only a few national newspapers, magazines, mainstream television stations and radio stations, but now they are dealing with a long list of media and social platforms from the Internet.

West Coast advertising companies, both in Silicon Valley's cutting-edge technology, and in Los Angeles' creative talent. Their deep-rooted digital marketing thinking does make them more competitive against their New York counterparts.

Take a look at the most popular ads and you'll probably know what's going on in the economy

Advertising has always been a response to the economic situationWhen the economy is good, the marketing budget of big companies is loose, and when the economy is bad, it is the advertising marketing department that cuts spending first. In this regard, the automotive industry should be the most profound experience.

In the first year after the 2008 financial crisis, total advertising spending by the 100 largest U.S. marketing companies fell 10.2% year-on-year, the largest decline on record. In the same year, U.S. auto sales fell by more than 1.3 million vehicles, and General Motors and Chrysler declared bankruptcy. At the same time, GM's advertising spend fell 14.9 percent year-on-year in 2008, while Ford's advertising spend fell more than 28 percent.

In 2012, the U.S. economy recovered. The first to feel this "spring river plumbing" is the automotive industry.

That year, three of the top seven companies in the U.S. spent the most on advertising each year were car companies and one was an auto insurance company. In the same year, car companies accounted for five of the 10 ads you watched last year.

In the years that followed, car ads remained regulars in YouTube's annual ads, but they appeared almost as often as one to two: when the economy didn't have big ups and downs, the auto industry naturally didn't need to be too bluffing.

Screenshot of the "A Message to Space" ad for Hyundai Motor in South Korea

Interesting thing to say: In 2012, Honda made an ad called "Matthew's Day Off", which was ranked 5th on YouTube's hot list that year. The ad finds Matthew Broderick, the lead actor in the movie "Spring Is Not a Reading Day Off," and asks him to restore the scene in the film. Because of the effort, many American viewers mistook the ad for a sequel to "Spring Is Not Reading Day."

Attached: YouTube ads for Top 1 viewed from 2012 to 2015

The most viewed YouTube ad in 2015, Clash of Clans "Revenge":

The most viewed YouTube ads of 2014 Nike "Winner Stays"

The most viewed YouTube ad of 2013, Evian "Baby and Me":

The most viewed YouTube ad in 2012, Nike "My Time Is Now":

http://v.qq.com/page/l/l/s/l0178o0qzls.html

The conveyor door

Top YouTube Ad Summary 2015 (Need to bring their own ladder, the same between）

http://www.adweek.com/news-gallery/advertising-branding/10-most-watched-ads-youtube-2015-168524

A summary of the most viewed YouTube ads in 2014

http://www.adweek.com/news-gallery/advertising-branding/10-most-watched-ads-youtube-2014-161843

Summary of the most viewed YouTube ads in 2013

http://www.adweek.com/news-gallery/advertising-branding/10-most-watched-ads-youtube-2013-154423#intro

Summary of the most viewed YouTube ads in 2012

http://www.adweek.com/news-gallery/advertising-branding/youtubes-20-most-watched-ads-2012-145905