One of the things that makes the advertising business so unique is that it is fundamentally premised on creating exceptions. Most businesses want to eliminate exceptions, Advertising wins awards for it. Exceptions to the ordinary, the common, the mundane.

So much time and effort is directed at media planning, audience composition, targeting and media weight – but they ignore the fact that creative is almost *always* the element that balances the equation.

The right ad in the wrong place is no different than the wrong ad in the right place.  Buying an audience and delivering what you *think* they want to see when you can know *what* they want to see is a missed opportunity.  Buying an audience online and feeding that audience an ad that’s not tailored to it or at the very least is the best fit ignores the intrinsic advantages of digital.

To solve for this, marketers need to spend as much time “knowing thy creative” as they spend “knowing thy customer.”  Frankly, it’s easier to know your creative – and it helps you understand your audience in the process.  It informs everything.

Did you succeed in your messaging objectives?  Did you win with your target audience?  Who else did you win with?

The vast, vast majority of the ads we’ve tested have distinct patterns – strengths and weaknesses, engaged audiences and blithe audiences, purchasers and aspirants.  Knowing thy creative allows marketers to dial up media plans to account for these inherent imbalances.  That’s why we do what we do – so marketers can build better creative and optimize existing creative portfolios.

But then there are the exceptions – those ads that are great across every component, every audience and every segment.  The exceptional.  Here are the top ads by length – from :15s to :60+s, the truly exceptional – as chosen by over 10.5 million US consumers.

Click the images to view the video list for each table.