Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Public service advertising doesn't often go viral (indeed, PSAs rarely appear on Google and Adweek's monthly leaderboard of the most-watched ads on YouTube). But the Ad Council knocked it out of the park last month—notching almost 50 million views (it has since topped that) for the R/GA-produced "Love Has No Labels" spot.

Samsung, which often dominates the leaderboard, placed another two spots in March, battling Durex's "#Connect" ad for the No. 2 slot.

Elsewhere, Geico's unskippable pre-roll ads proved to be just that, as the family-dinner ad got more than 5 million views. And YouTube itself placed two spots on the March list, for one of its #DearMe spots and for YouTube Music Awards welcome video.

See all 10 spots below....

Can Google Glass help cross cultural boundaries and even save lives? It can in "Captions," a 4-minute short film promoting a translation app currently in development.

Writer, director and editor Joe Sill of digital studio Everdream Pictures describes the cinematic clip as a "branded content spec ad," much like the team's earlier, unofficial Tesla spot, "Modern Spaceship," whose admirers included even Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

And sure enough, the new video has also gotten some top-level corporate love, with the official Google Glass page giving it a share on Facebook.

Sam Morrill, senior curator at Vimeo, also left a comment on the clip: "Interesting film. Really sharp look."

"Captions" focuses on a Glass translation app that helps a photographer in the Mexican desert communicate with a boy who's been bitten by a snake....

In the breakneck pace of digital culture today, our attention span has been whittled down to the length of a two-second GIF. Deciding to click play on a longer video often seems like too much of a commitment. But sometimes, you have to devote your full attention to a video, because it's just too damned good, whether it's a visual explanation of a woolly scientific concept, a history of video-game graphics, or plain old eye candy. What follows are the videos we couldn't take our eyeballs off of in 2014....