marketing

A two-minute clip of comedian Bill Hicks doing his routine on marketing and advertising, with explicit language. He mocks marketers and urges them to get out of the business.

A two-minute Bill Hicks comedy bit attacking advertising and marketing people.

A short clip of Bill Hicks's stand-up bit telling marketers and advertisers to kill themselves, which is a harsh critique of advertising.

A Last Week Tonight segment on how pharmaceutical companies spend billions marketing drugs to doctors. It uses comedy to lay out the industry's questionable practices.

A short clip of Steve Jobs explaining how sales and marketing people take over mature companies from product people, leading to product decline.

A three-minute excerpt of a Steve Jobs interview in which he describes how monopolies let sales and marketing people displace product people, rotting a company's product sensibility, with Xerox as the example.

An internal 1991 NeXT video in which Steve Jobs explains the company's product and marketing strategy. It shows NeXT aiming at the Unix workstation market.

Simon Sinek's TED talk presents the 'golden circle' model: great leaders and companies inspire action by starting with why they do something, before how or what. He illustrates it with Apple, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers and, as a counterexample, TiVo.

Adam Conover's talk at a millennial marketing conference argues that generations are an unscientific, condescending idea and that millennials do not exist as a real category. The description notes that researcher Jean Twenge later said he misrepresented some of her work.

Dollar Shave Club's low-budget launch ad, in which the founder jokes his way through the case for cheap mail-order razors.

Tom Scott writes a more honest VPN ad, with the sponsor's name redacted, and explains why the typical claims in VPN advertising are misleading. He notes the sponsor was not happy about it.

A four-minute Onion Talks parody in which a social media consultant pitches never putting any effort into social marketing. It lampoons TED-style talks and marketing consultants.

hbomberguy examines whether a product can be truly progressive, looking at brands that adopt social causes in their marketing, with the Gillette ad as a prompt. It argues the behavior is driven by profit, not politics.

Google's 2010 Chrome ad filmed web page rendering with a high-speed camera, comparing it with a potato gun, a pirate ship and lightning. It presented browser speed as Chrome's key selling point.

Chapter 11 of the documentary The Corporation, on how marketing targets children, including the Nag Factor study that taught kids to nag their parents more effectively.

A one-minute animated commercial for the antidepressant Zoloft, described as the original that inspired later sequels and parodies.

MegaLag investigates PayPal's Honey browser extension, showing how it swaps affiliate attribution and was promoted by large YouTube influencers. It includes technical demonstrations of the affiliate tag replacement in browser dev tools.

The 2010 Old Spice commercial featuring Isaiah Mustafa, shot as a continuous sequence with scene changes and practical effects. It became a famous viral ad.

Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on how Howard Moskowitz found that there is no single perfect spaghetti sauce. He draws a larger point about choice, preference and happiness.

A compilation of Apple's 'I'm a Mac, I'm a PC' ad campaign from 2006 onward.

A 2017 Apple TV commercial for the iPad Pro in which a kid asks "What's a computer?" while using the tablet. It pitches the all-screen iPad Pro as something that goes beyond what people think of as a computer.

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix keynotes the OMR 2017 marketing festival on big data and personality-based targeting in political campaigns. It was given before the company's scandal broke.

A short Tesla promotional video showing a car driving itself along a route from the company's Palo Alto headquarters, marketed as Full Self-Driving.

A 2018 Facebook UK ad, part of the 'Here Together' campaign, promising to do more to keep users safe and protect their privacy after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

A viral Squatty Potty ad in which a unicorn demonstrates the supposed benefits of squatting to poop. It is a humorous product pitch about toilet posture.

Apple's 1997 Think Different commercial, 'Here's to the Crazy Ones', which launched the campaign after Steve Jobs returned. It celebrates misfits and unconventional thinkers.

Jason Cohen's MicroConf talk on designing a bootstrapped business by starting from your own strengths, goals and constraints. He works backward to the business model, pricing, market and product that fit, with practical points like annual prepay and pricing tiers.

Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas investigates the Mikkelsen Twins and the ghostwritten-audiobook passive-income course industry, even playing along with the scheme. It is a long video essay on get-rich-quick publishing grifts.

Folding Ideas uses the rise and fall of the YouTube competitor VidMe to examine why platforms are not friends to creators. It argues that alternatives to big platforms tend to attract the users banned from the original and lack a core vision.

A short street-level clip of Joe Ades, the New York pitchman who sold vegetable peelers to crowds on the sidewalk. It shows his patter, showmanship and crowd handling in action.

Simon Sinek's TEDx talk arguing that great leaders and companies inspire action by communicating why they do something before how or what. He uses Apple as his main example.

Veritasium explains why clickbait titles and thumbnails work, how he tests them, and why educational creators feel pushed to use them. He classifies types of clickbait and discusses the trade-offs.

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

The original five-minute Dropbox demo video, which presented the product's features before a finished product existed. It was aimed at technical early adopters and became famous as a launch strategy.

FortNine explains how Harley-Davidson ended up in decline, from a narrow lifestyle niche and an aging customer base to the pandemic hitting a company already in trouble.

Tom Scott examines why YouTubers must declare paid endorsements while TV, film and other media face no such rule, comparing regulations in the UK and US.

Apple's classic 'Think Different' commercial, a one-minute spot celebrating creative misfits and innovators. This upload is from 2006.

Segment co-founder and CEO Peter Reinhardt recounts how his company found product-market fit, including how a product grew out of a small feature of another. It is a lecture from Stanford's Startup School course.

Velcro Brand's legal team makes a short, humorous ad asking people not to use "velcro" as a noun or verb and to say hook and loop instead. It is a tongue-in-cheek lesson in defending a trademark against genericization.