Over the last couple of years YouTube became the second biggest search engine in the world, behind Google. With that, its significance for marketing opportunities was followed by advertising dollars.

Side note: YouTube was created in 2005 by a couple of former PayPal employees and was bought by Google for $1.65 billion at the end of 2006. What a story, eh?

Here are the top five YouTube ads since the existence of the platform. Watch all five with your analytical hat on – they are all quite short yet there is plenty to be learned.

This is a playlist so the ads will play one after the other:

And do YouTube ads work?

If you are thinking about using YouTube to spread awareness about your brand, product, or services you should think about it in a different way then treating your ad videos as “ads”. Think about it rather as content marketing than selling to make the ads work for you.