What makes a marketing campaign truly memorable?
Some campaigns generate clicks, leads and sales before disappearing into the marketing archives. Others become part of popular culture. Their slogans get repeated, their adverts get parodied and, years after the campaign first appeared, people still know exactly which brand you’re talking about.
Those are the campaigns we’re interested in here.
Welcome to KAYBE’s marketing royalty: our countdown of ten of the best marketing campaigns of all time.
This is, of course, a subjective list. There isn’t a scientifically proven formula that can tell us whether one brilliant campaign deserves the crown more than another. Instead, we’ve looked at campaigns that stuck in people’s minds, communicated something distinctive about the brand and gave marketers something worth learning from.
Some had enormous budgets. Others absolutely didn’t.
So, which campaign gets the KAYBE crown?
TL;DR
The best marketing campaigns don’t all look the same, but there are some useful lessons running through this list:
- Keep the idea clear. Some of the most memorable campaigns are built around remarkably simple messages.
- Give people something to remember. A distinctive line, story, sound, character or creative idea can become strongly associated with the brand.
- Understand what makes you different. Great campaigns often turn a product or brand’s USP into something customers immediately understand.
- Make people feel something. Humour, confidence, nostalgia, belonging and empowerment can all make marketing more memorable.
- Be consistent without becoming repetitive. A strong campaign idea can often evolve across channels and creative executions while remaining recognisably yours.
- Give the audience a part to play. Personalisation, participation and shareability can turn a campaign into something people actively want to engage with.
- Don’t assume budget beats creativity. A big media spend can buy attention, but it can’t make a weak idea interesting.
The real lesson isn’t to copy any of the campaigns below. It’s to understand why they worked and apply those principles to your own audience, brand and objectives.
What makes a great marketing campaign?
Before we start handing out crowns, it’s worth defining what we’re actually looking for.
A great marketing campaign needs to do more than look good.
It should have a clear reason for existing, speak to the right audience and communicate something meaningful about the brand, product or service behind it. Ideally, it should also give people a reason to remember it after the campaign has finished.
That’s something you’ll notice throughout this list. The execution might be funny, emotional, ridiculous or incredibly simple, but the strongest campaigns aren’t creative for the sake of being creative. There’s an idea underneath them.
Let’s get into the countdown.
10. Dove: Real Beauty
We’re starting with one of the most recognisable examples of a brand building a campaign around something much bigger than the product itself.
Dove’s Real Beauty campaign positioned the brand around ideas of confidence, representation and a more inclusive view of beauty. Rather than simply talking about the features of soap, moisturiser or deodorant, the campaign gave Dove a much wider conversation to be part of.
It certainly achieved its aim of developing a distinctive and positive brand persona.
I’ll admit, I’ve always had a slight personal gripe with the tension between telling people to appreciate their natural beauty while operating within a wider industry built around changing how people look. But whether you share that view or not, there’s no denying how successfully Dove made the campaign part of its wider brand identity.
KAYBE has since looked more closely at how Dove uses emotion and human stories in our guide to the selling power of storytelling.
Why it worked
Dove wasn’t simply marketing a product. It was creating a recognisable point of view around its brand.
KAYBE takeaway: People may forget a list of product features. They’re much more likely to remember what a campaign made them think or feel.
9. Death Wish Coffee: Welcome death
I wanted this list to include something that demonstrated what a smaller brand can do with the right opportunity and the right creative idea.
Enter Death Wish Coffee.
The coffee company found itself with an opportunity most small businesses could only dream about: appearing during the Super Bowl through a campaign with Intuit QuickBooks. But a massive opportunity is only useful if you’ve got something worthwhile to put in front of the audience. And Death Wish did.
Rather than immediately revealing itself as a coffee advert, the creative keeps you guessing. That matters because curiosity buys the campaign something every advertiser is desperate for: attention. You want to know what’s happening, so you keep watching.
Why it worked
The media opportunity gave Death Wish reach, but the creative gave people a reason to pay attention to it.
KAYBE takeaway: Budget can put your campaign in front of people. The idea still has to make them care.
8. Rubicon: Who likes the mango?
Sometimes, you really do just need a great jingle. “Who likes the mango?” earned its place in the original version of this list because it’s one of those bits of marketing that somehow gets lodged in your brain and refuses to leave.
Combine that with Rubicon’s wider “Love the exotic” positioning and you’ve got something simple, distinctive and closely connected to the product.
There’s nothing particularly complicated going on. And that’s part of the point.
Why it worked
The campaign gave Rubicon recognisable words and sound that people could quickly associate with the brand.
KAYBE takeaway: Don’t confuse complexity with creativity. Sometimes the strongest brand asset is the simple thing people can’t stop repeating.
7. AirBnB: Live There
Talk about capturing your USP with a campaign idea.
Airbnb entered a market where the established way to travel meant hotels, resorts and other traditional accommodation. Its offering gave people something fundamentally different: the opportunity to stay in homes and experience destinations in another way.
“Live There” captures that difference brilliantly. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of booking somebody’s apartment or house, the campaign focuses on the benefit of the difference. That’s an important distinction.
Your unique selling point is useful, but the customer still needs to understand why that difference matters to them.
Why it worked
Airbnb turned a distinctive feature of the service into a benefit the traveller could immediately picture.
KAYBE takeaway: Don’t stop at telling people what makes you different. Show them why they’re going to care.
6. Skittles: Taste the Rainbow
Another brilliant line that immediately connects to the product. “Taste the Rainbow” brings together two of Skittles’ most recognisable characteristics: colour and taste.
The clever bit is everything the brand has been able to build around it. A strong campaign platform doesn’t necessarily mean producing exactly the same advert over and over again. The central idea can remain recognisable while the creative around it keeps changing. That’s exactly what makes a concept like this so useful.
Why it worked
Skittles found a simple idea broad enough to inspire different creative executions without losing the connection back to the product.
KAYBE takeaway: Consistency doesn’t mean sameness. Find the bit of your brand that should remain familiar and give yourself room to play around it.
5. McDonald’s: I’m Lovin’ It
Need I say more?
You already know the line.
You can probably hear it too.
And that tells you an awful lot about why “I’m Lovin’ It” belongs on this list.
It’s simple, easy to remember and flexible enough to work alongside an enormous range of McDonald’s marketing activity. It doesn’t need to explain a particular burger, offer or restaurant experience because it operates as a consistent brand asset sitting above all of them.
It works in adverts. It works in digital content. It works in out-of-home. It works with product campaigns.
Simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy to create, but when you get it right, it can be incredibly powerful.
Why it worked
McDonald’s created something short and distinctive enough to become part of the brand itself.
KAYBE takeaway: Brand recognition is built through repetition and consistency. If you’ve got something distinctive, don’t be afraid to keep using it.
4. Dollar Shave Club: F***ing amazing
Low-budget, high-value. Isn’t that the sort of marketing plenty of smaller businesses dream about?
Dollar Shave Club didn’t need an enormous celebrity line-up or a glossy campaign that looked like everybody else’s shaving advert. It needed an idea people wanted to watch and share. The now-famous launch video was direct, funny and unmistakably confident about what the brand was offering. Most importantly, it understood the type of business it wanted to be.
Rather than attempting to look like one of the enormous established shaving brands, Dollar Shave Club leaned into the fact that it wasn’t one. That difference became the creative opportunity.
Why it worked
The campaign’s personality made the brand distinctive without requiring the kind of budget available to the biggest names in its market.
KAYBE takeaway: A good creative idea can be worth far more than adding another famous face to an otherwise forgettable campaign.
3. Budweiser: Wassup
Some campaigns are remembered because they’re beautifully shot. Others have an incredible emotional story. And then there’s “Wassup”.
It’s difficult to explain precisely why something becomes so embedded in popular culture that people start repeating it, referencing it and parodying it for years afterwards.
But that’s exactly what happened here.
The campaign is deliberately simple: friends, a repeated phrase and Budweiser sitting naturally within the interaction.
And once the audience started repeating it themselves, the campaign became much bigger than the original advert.
Why it worked
People didn’t simply watch the campaign. They joined in.
The phrase was easy to imitate, reference and parody, which gave the idea a life beyond the media Budweiser originally paid for.
KAYBE takeaway: If your audience actively wants to repeat, share or participate in an idea, your campaign can travel much further than the original advert.
2. Coca-Cola: Share a Coke
This remains one of my favourite examples of taking something enormous and making it feel personal. Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most recognisable brands. Creating anything that makes a business of that scale feel individually relevant isn’t easy. Share a Coke found a wonderfully simple way to do it.
Putting people’s names onto bottles and cans turned the packaging into part of the campaign. People could look for themselves, search for friends and family, buy a Coke specifically for another person and share what they’d found.
The product itself became personalised marketing media. And that’s where the idea becomes particularly clever: the campaign strengthened the customer relationship while still giving people another reason to purchase the product. A double whammy.
Why it worked
Personalisation created both a reason to engage and a reason to buy.
KAYBE takeaway: Good personalisation shouldn’t just add somebody’s name to generic marketing. It should make the experience more relevant or meaningful to that person.
That’s a principle we come back to regularly at KAYBE: marketing to everyone can quickly become marketing to no one.
1. Always: #LikeAGirl
And our marketing crown goes to Always and #LikeAGirl.
What makes this campaign stand out for me is the combination of emotion, storytelling and a message that feels genuinely connected to the brand and its audience. The campaign takes a familiar phrase and demonstrates how its meaning can change as girls grow older, before challenging the idea that doing something “like a girl” should be interpreted as an insult.
It doesn’t reveal everything immediately. It lets the idea develop, gives the audience something to think about and lands on a clear emotional message around confidence. And importantly, that message doesn’t feel randomly attached to the brand.
For a company producing menstrual products and communicating directly with women and girls, confidence through puberty is a relevant conversation to be part of. That’s what pushes it to number one for me.
Why it worked
Purpose, audience and brand all fit together.
KAYBE takeaway: A powerful message becomes much stronger when people can understand why your brand is the one delivering it.
What can we learn from the best marketing campaigns?
So, our champion has been crowned.
But unless you’ve got Coca-Cola’s distribution network, McDonald’s brand recognition or a Super Bowl advertising opportunity lined up for next week, what does any of this actually mean for your marketing?
More than you might think.
The biggest lesson from these campaigns isn’t about scale. It’s about clarity.
Every example on this list gives its audience something distinctive to hold onto. Sometimes that’s a line. Sometimes it’s an emotion, a story, a joke or a personalised experience. But the creative idea is connected to something meaningful about the brand or product.
That’s where marketers sometimes get things backwards.
You don’t start with:
“What outrageous campaign could we make?”
You start with the audience, the objective and what you’re trying to communicate.
Who do you need to reach? What do you need them to think, feel or do? What makes your offer different? Why should anybody care?
Then you find the creative idea that brings those things to life.
That’s also how we approach campaign strategy at KAYBE: the audience, message, channels, landing experience, follow-up and measurement need to work together around the result the campaign is supposed to deliver.
Because an unforgettable advert that doesn’t help the business achieve anything is still just an unforgettable advert.
You don’t need to become the next Coca-Cola
There’s another trap with lists like this. You see what enormous global brands have created and assume good marketing needs an enormous global-brand budget. It doesn’t.
Your campaign doesn’t need half the country quoting it back to you. It needs the right audience to notice it and take the right action.
For a multinational consumer business, success could involve millions of interactions. For a specialist B2B business, an outstanding campaign might need to get the attention of ten specific people. The scale is different. The principle isn’t.
Know who you’re talking to. Give them something relevant. Make the message clear. And create the kind of marketing that gives them a reason to remember you afterwards.
Best marketing campaign FAQs
What makes a marketing campaign successful?
A successful marketing campaign starts with a clear objective and a well-defined audience.
From there, the message, creative idea, channels and customer journey all need to support what you’re trying to achieve.
Memorability can certainly help, but a campaign isn’t successful purely because people liked or shared it. The measures that matter depend on the objective, whether that’s awareness, engagement, leads, sales, customer retention or something else.
What makes a marketing campaign memorable?
Distinctiveness helps.
That could come from a strong story, recognisable visual identity, humour, emotion, personalisation, a memorable line or another creative element that audiences can associate with the brand.
The campaigns on this list use very different techniques, but they all give people something identifiable to remember.
Do you need a big budget to create a great marketing campaign?
No.
A larger budget can give you access to more media, production resources and reach, but it can’t compensate for a weak idea.
Smaller businesses may not need huge reach in the first place. A tightly targeted campaign that reaches exactly the right people can be far more valuable than a massive campaign seen by an audience that was never likely to buy.
Should businesses copy successful marketing campaigns?
Take inspiration from them, but don’t copy them.
The reason these campaigns worked is because the ideas suited the individual brand, audience and moment. Simply recreating another company’s creative is unlikely to have the same effect and won’t give your own audience anything distinctive to associate with you.
Instead, identify the principle you admire and ask how it could apply to your own marketing.
How do you come up with a creative marketing campaign idea?
Start with the strategy rather than trying to force creativity.
Define the audience, objective, problem and message first. Understand what matters to the people you’re targeting and what makes your product, service or brand worth their attention.
The creative idea then has a job to do: communicate that message in a way people will notice and remember.
How should you measure a marketing campaign?
Measure it against the objective you set at the beginning.
An awareness campaign may focus on relevant reach, brand visibility or engagement, while a lead-generation campaign needs to look much further towards qualified leads, opportunities and pipeline. An ecommerce campaign may ultimately be judged on sales and revenue.
Don’t choose the easiest metric to report. Choose the metrics that tell you whether the campaign did what it was supposed to do.
Who gets your marketing crown?
There we have it: KAYBE’s top ten.
You may completely agree with the rankings. You may be furious that your favourite didn’t even make the list. You may still be wondering how Cadbury’s Gorilla missed out.
That’s half the fun.
But whichever campaign you’d put on the throne, the ones that stick with us tend to have something in common: they make us feel, remember or participate rather than simply telling us what to buy.
And that’s a lesson worth stealing.
Want to create marketing people actually remember?
The campaigns above might look completely different, but many of them share one powerful ingredient: a story or idea that gives the audience something more interesting than a sales pitch.
If you want to bring more of that thinking into your own marketing, take a look at KAYBE’s Storyselling: Combining the power of words with digital forensics.
It explores how to understand your audience, shape a story around what matters to them and turn that story into marketing designed to connect and convert.
