The 30 Best 90s Commercials on YouTube (2026)

The best 90s commercial on YouTube is Budweiser's "Whassup" from 1999, the ad that turned a phone greeting into a decade of catchphrase. If you want one link that keeps going after it, The Hall of Advertising is the deepest browsable archive of the era. For British ads, try the History of Advertising Trust, the charity that keeps the country's advertising archive.

Most lists like this are screenshots and memories. This one is 30 ads you can watch right now. Every link was working on August 31, 2026.

Where to start

The 10 best 90s commercials

1. Budweiser, "Whassup" (1999)

1:01 · USA · The Hall of Advertising

Four friends ring each other up and say almost nothing. That is the whole ad. For about three years afterwards you could not walk through an office without someone doing it at you.

It came from a short film called True that Charles Stone III made with his actual friends, which is why nobody in it sounds like an actor. Watch it.

2. Got Milk?, "Aaron Burr" (1993)

0:58 · USA · Anthony Kalamut

A man who knows everything about American history finally hears his question on a radio phone-in. He cannot answer it. His mouth is full of peanut butter and the milk carton is empty.

This was the first "Got Milk?" ad. Michael Bay directed it, four years before Armageddon, and Sean Whalen plays the man watching his one moment go past. Watch it.

3. PlayStation, "Mental Wealth" (1999)

0:43 · UK · PlayStation Europe

A woman with a warped, not-quite-right face looks straight at you and talks about what is going on inside your head. You never see a console or a game.

Chris Cunningham directed it while he was also making videos for Aphex Twin and Björk, and it shows. Sony still keeps this one on its own channel. Watch it.

4. Coca-Cola, "Northern Lights" (1993)

0:31 · USA · The Hall of Advertising

Polar bears sit and watch the northern lights and drink Coke. The animation was genuinely startling in 1993.

This is where the Coke bears came from, and they have been back most Christmases since. Watch it.

5. Budweiser, "Frogs" (1995)

0:39 · USA · The Hall of Advertising

Three frogs sit in a swamp. One says "Bud". One says "Weis". One says "Er". That is the ad.

It went out during the 1995 Super Bowl. Gore Verbinski directed it, eight years before Pirates of the Caribbean. Watch it.

6. Guinness, "Surfer" (1999)

1:40 · UK · The Hall of Advertising

A surfer waits. Then waits some more. When the wave finally comes in, it turns into white horses.

Jonathan Glazer directed it, to Leftfield's "Phat Planet". He went on to make Sexy Beast and Under the Skin. Watch it.

7. Apple, "Here's to the Crazy Ones" (1997)

0:30 · USA · vintagemacmuseum

Thirty seconds of black and white footage of Einstein, Ali, Picasso, Gandhi and a dozen others. No product appears at any point.

This launched Think Different, the year Steve Jobs came back to Apple. Apple does not keep it online, so this copy comes from a private Mac collection. Watch it.

8. This Is SportsCenter, the first spots (1995)

4:45 · USA · ESPN Throwback

Athletes and presenters wander around the ESPN office as though it were an insurance company, and nobody ever acknowledges that anything is strange.

This is four and a half minutes of the earliest ones, put up by ESPN themselves, so you are getting several ads rather than one. Watch it.

9. Taco Bell, "Chihuahua" (1997)

0:32 · USA · The Hall of Advertising

A small dog walks straight past a woman and heads for the man holding a taco. "Yo quiero Taco Bell."

Within a year you could not get away from the line, and the dog had its own toys. Watch it.

10. Nike, "If You Let Me Play" (1995)

0:31 · USA · Ross Knights

Girls take it in turns to say what would happen if they were allowed to play sport. Fewer of them would get breast cancer. More of them would leave a man who hit them.

Nike ran it in 1995, in the middle of the argument over Title IX. Nike does not host it, so this is somebody else's upload. Watch it.

20 more 90s commercials worth watching

Campaigns often ran for years either side of the spot listed. The Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan ads started at the 1992 Super Bowl, and Snickers had been running "not going anywhere for a while" since 1995.

Who put these on YouTube

Nobody keeps paperwork for a 30 year old ad, so the question is not really whether a copy is official. It is whether whoever posted it knew what they had.

A few brands kept their own. Sony still hosts "Mental Wealth" and "Double Life" on PlayStation Europe, and ESPN put its own early SportsCenter reel on ESPN Throwback. Where the brand has a copy, that is the one to watch.

The History of Advertising Trust is a British charity that archives advertising for a living. There are only 33 videos on its channel, but it knows exactly what each one is.

The Hall of Advertising is a private collection of 4,323 ads, every one titled "Brand, Spot (year, country)" with the director named in the description. It is not official, and it is still better labelled than most official channels.

Everything else is somebody's old tape. "Aaron Burr", "If You Let Me Play", the Cindy Crawford Pepsi ad and the Staples one survive no other way. Nobody official kept them.

The archives worth following

Do not go by subscriber count. The History of Advertising Trust has 709 of them and knows more about these ads than anyone else here. Counts checked August 31, 2026.

Watch the runtime, not the title

The same ad usually exists in four or five lengths: a 30 second version, a 60, the director's cut, and somebody's tape where the end of the previous ad is still playing. The title almost never tells you which one you have got. The runtime does.

Three from this page:

• Guinness, "Surfer" runs 1:40 in the Hall of Advertising copy linked above. VSMFestival's copy, sourced from the History of Advertising Trust archive, runs 1:01. Both are the same ad.
• Dunlop, "Unexpected" runs 1:21 in the Trust's own upload. A longer director's cut circulates separately.
• Tango, "Orange Man" runs 0:41, which is the original. It was reworked after children started copying the slap, and a shorter replacement version aired afterwards.

Compilations are the other trap. The SportsCenter entry above runs 4:45 because it is several ads in a row, not one long one.

Common questions

Where can I watch a lot of old commercials at once? The Hall of Advertising for single ads you can actually find again, and the Internet Archive for whole recorded ad breaks. Searching YouTube itself is worse than either, because you get reaction videos and hour-long compilations before you get any ads.

Why do so many famous 90s ads have no official copy? Most brands do not think old ads are worth the trouble. The rights are split between the agency, the production company and whoever wrote the music, so it is easier to leave them offline. That is why "Aaron Burr" sits on one man's personal channel and not on anything owned by the milk board.

Which famous ads just miss the decade? British Airways' "Face" and the first Energizer Bunny spots are both 1989, and the Sony Bravia and Cadbury gorilla ads people file alongside these are 2005 and 2007.

When you have watched all thirty

The Hall of Advertising has another 4,000 ads sitting on it. The problem is that YouTube makes you pick every single one by hand.

Channel Surfer turns a YouTube channel into one that just plays, like television. Point it at an ad archive and they keep coming without you choosing anything. It is free.

If you would rather just get told when one of these channels posts something, paste its URL into our YouTube RSS feed generator.

For more of the same era, see the best classic TV YouTube channels, or the best documentaries on YouTube when you want something longer than a minute.