These are campaigns I kept thinking about, not a neutral ranking of 2022. My perspective comes from working inside advertising: I look for the thought that could survive a difficult brief, a skeptical client room and the removal of the expensive production layer.
I did not work on the campaigns below, and I separate my creative judgments from factual claims about dates, credits, and results.
Some of 2022’s strongest advertising ideas were not complicated. They took a product truth, brand problem, or cultural tension and turned it into a creative device people could understand almost immediately.
That is the useful lens for looking back now: not which campaign won the most praise, but which mechanisms still help marketers make better work.
The most reusable lesson from these campaigns is to build the execution around one recognizable brand truth. The stranger or more theatrical the creative becomes, the more important that simple center of gravity is.
1. Ocean Spray made the product’s physical behavior the idea
Ocean Spray’s “Power Your Holidays” campaign centered on something almost absurdly specific: the wobble of jellied cranberry sauce. Orchard Creative turned that familiar product behavior into a dance, a bespoke track, social extensions, and even a 10-hour holiday fireplace execution.
What makes the work useful is the discipline underneath the weirdness. The campaign does not borrow a random cultural trend and attach a logo at the end. The entertainment starts with the product itself. The question I would ask is what physical behavior, ritual, phrase, packaging cue, or customer habit belongs unusually strongly to their brand.
Campaign reference: Ocean Spray’s 2022 campaign announcement.
2. Upwork dramatized a strategic argument instead of explaining it
Upwork’s “This Is How We Work Now” campaign could have been a conventional B2B message about remote talent and flexible work. Instead, the anthem film brings a dead 1980s-style CEO back to life to declare that old workplace rules were made up and can be replaced.
The creative leap matters because the underlying proposition is abstract. “Work has changed” is easy to say and easy to ignore. A resurrected executive makes the old model literally dead. Upwork said the campaign expanded into 15 spots across five storylines, giving the central metaphor enough range to work as a platform rather than a one-off joke.
Campaign reference: Upwork’s official campaign release.
3. Nerf turned a product material into a character
When Nerf introduced Murph, its first official mascot, the character was built from Nerf darts from head to toe. The Martin Agency described Murph as the center of a broader brand effort built around “Unleash the Play in You.”
This is a useful mascot lesson because the character is not merely a generic friendly creature wearing brand colors. Its body is the product language. Even without a pack shot, the material itself does identification work. For brands considering characters, icons, or recurring fictional worlds, the strongest route is often to make the asset inseparable from distinctive product or brand cues.
Campaign reference: The Martin Agency’s Murph announcement.
A campaign can be highly memorable without being broadly transferable. Before copying a tactic such as a mascot, musical, or absurdist film, identify the underlying mechanism—product truth, metaphor, distinctive asset, or customer ritual—and adapt that instead.
4. Pringles exaggerated a familiar packaging problem into a lifetime story
For its 2022 Super Bowl spot, Pringles moved away from its prior flavor-stacking idea and built “Stuck In” around a familiar joke: reaching into the tube for the last crisp and getting a hand stuck. The story follows one fan through major life moments while the can remains attached.
The execution works as a case study in exaggeration. The starting point is tiny and recognizable; the campaign then stretches the consequence to an impossible extreme. That structure can be useful when a brand owns a familiar friction or behavior that customers already joke about. The creative task is not to hide the quirk, but to decide whether it can become a distinctive source of entertainment without making the product look genuinely unsafe or defective.
Campaign reference: Pringles’ 2022 Big Game announcement.
5. Hippo used prevention to challenge the category script
Hippo’s “Own It” work positioned home insurance around proactive protection rather than only showing up after something goes wrong. Partners in Crime framed the brief around making homeowners question why they should not expect more from an insurer, emphasizing preventative technology and services.
My broader creative takeaway is category inversion. Insurance advertising often focuses on reassurance after damage. Hippo’s positioning asks what happens if the brand enters the story earlier. Marketers can use the same exercise by writing down the standard category sequence—problem, purchase, service, resolution—and looking for a credible point where their brand can move the narrative upstream.
Campaign reference: Partners in Crime’s Hippo case study.
6. Chicago turned tap water into a piece of civic branding
Chicago’s “Chicagwa” project put city tap water into limited-edition cans and treated a public utility like a local brand asset. Contemporary reporting also made clear that the campaign existed alongside serious criticism of the city’s slow lead-service-line replacement efforts.
That tension is exactly why the example is worth studying carefully. Packaging an ordinary public resource can create conversation and local identity, but communications cannot substitute for operational performance. A clever brand expression becomes fragile when the underlying service has unresolved trust problems.
When reviewing a campaign idea, write the strategy in one sentence and then remove the execution. If the strategic thought is still distinctive and defensible without the celebrity, stunt, animation, or media placement, the creative has a stronger foundation.
What these 2022 campaigns have in common
Across very different categories, the strongest mechanisms share three traits. They begin with something ownable, they can be explained quickly, and they create room for multiple executions. Ocean Spray had the jiggle.
Upwork had the death of old work rules. Nerf had a mascot physically made from the product. Pringles had the stuck hand. Hippo moved insurance earlier in the customer story. Chicagwa turned a civic utility into a branded object.
The practical question is not “How can we make something as weird as this?” It is “What do we have permission to exaggerate, personify, invert, dramatize, or package in a way a competitor could not copy as naturally?”
Do not treat awards, press coverage, social chatter, or a memorable creative idea as proof of commercial effectiveness. Unless reliable incrementality, sales, brand-lift, or controlled evidence is available, use campaign examples to study creative mechanisms rather than claim that the advertising caused business growth.
For a more recent comparison, see my review of 11 innovative marketing campaigns from 2025 worth studying.
