Friday Round-Up: 5 New Video Ads You Should Watch Right Now (30/11/2012)

Compiled by Liana Birkett, Andy Scofield and David Waterhouse

Snoop wished us all Happy Holidizzles, a corner shop seranaded customers with reggae and Microsoft told everyone that they don't suck quite so much anymore. Yep, it's just another week in Adland.

But which new ads have been setting the Viral Video Chart alight over the last seven days? Which ads have been the talk of the online world this week? Well, here are our five picks:

Every once in a while a video hits the web that gets people dancing, quoting lines or humming a catchy tune. And tunes don't come much catchier than one starring cute little cartoon creatures being brutally killed, but it seems a group of designers have stopped singing for long enough to produce their own parody.

Dumb Ways To Die is the horrific but hilarious safety message from Melbourne Metro trains. It warned about the dangers of being careless around railway lines. The clip roared around the web quicker than a runaway train, becoming one of the most successful ads of the year, earning over 2 million shares to date.

Seattle-based creative agency, Cinesaurus, create content for some big brands, including YouTube and Gap, and are probably best known for spoofing another internet classic, We're NASA And We know It. It spoofed LMFAO's Sexy And I Know It, celebrating the work of the scientists and engineers in charge of landing the Curiosity Rover on Mars.

The agency makes a return to the red planet as Cool Things To Find puts Curiosity centre stage. The rover trundles across the martian landscape uncovering alien life and solving supposedly earth-bound mysteries.

It might not be the most popular online ad ever to hit the web here on earth, but it's certainly the first ever to be hummed by a robot explorer on Mars.

The end of the world is nigh, according to the Mayans and a few nervous people on YouTube at least. But it's OK, because with a small sip of mineral water, you'll be strong enough, smart enough and just damn cool enough to save the world all by yourself.

Vytautas is the bottled water brand that unleashed the bombastic Earth's Juice across the internet back in March. The crazy clip suggested that sipping Vytaautas could give you the energy to seize electric eels with your bare hands, spinning them so fast you could tear a hole in the space-time continuum.

Now, with the end of the world approaching, the brand has launched The Apocalypse Edition. Even more insane than the original, the new clip opens with a pug in sunglasses screaming as the universe implodes around him. From then on, things only get weirder, with fire-breathing wolves riding jet-powered lions across the sky.

Thankfully, though, the clip does put viewers in some sort of control. After explaining that a giant planet, apparently made of cats, is careening through space towards the Earth, the clip hands over control. Viewers are able to pick one of three ways to defend our home planet, with each launching into an equally bizarre follow-up episode.

Reportedly produced by students, the clip strongly echoes online staples like PowerThirst and Rathergood.com. We don't know if a bottle of water can help you save the world, but if there is one that can, it'll be a bottle of Vytautas.

We all love our local corner shop. An easily accessible little store with a friendly owner, where we can get the morning paper on the way to work, grab any forgotten items from the weekly shop, and pass by to pick up a bottle for the evening. This isn't any old corner shop, though. This one makes music.

Sat on a corner in Dalston, East London, this little Food & Wine shop looks like any other from the outside. But, as many unsuspecting passers-by find out, pick up a Red Stripe and something a little bit magical might just happen.

With the removal of a bottle of the Jamaican lager, the customer is in for a surprise. The shop bursts into life and soon enough, consumer products are all, quite appropriately, pumping out the tune of A Message To You Rudy, by Dandy Livingstone.

Flabberghasted customers are beckoning their friends into the shop, laughing and singing along to the words, which are played out on the shop's CCTV screen, karaoke-style.

Experiential ads have been quite a hit this year. After the success of Coke Zero's Unlock the 007 in you, and LG's So Real It's Scary, it's no wonder that more and more brands are trying it out. 

Watch the amount of work that went into the ad here, and keep and ear to the ground the next time you walk into a corner shop - a box of juice might just start serenading you. 

It's not everyday that a brand suggests that its product sucks, and it's certainly not often that a company spends good money on telling it to the world. Microsoft has done just that in its latest ad for the newly-launched Internet Explorer 10.

The ad features an irritating Internet troll who goes to any measure to tell Microsoft how much Internet Explorer sucks. With lava lamps and a Chinese takeaway in the background, he smugly tweets, comments and updates his status about how rubbish and unimpressive the web browser is. 

Microsoft isn't a stranger to self-deprecation, with previous ads running along the same theme. An ad released earlier this year, The Browser You Loved To Hate, starred a geek who was having therapy for his irrational hate of Internet Explorer. 

Brutal honesty is a refreshing way of advertising. Instead of just ramming new product information down viewers' throats, this rather different approach is entertaining and enages an audience. It may just work in its bid to reclaim market share from Google Chrome. 

Let's hope Internet Explorer 10 turns out to be just as effective as its ad. Or else, I'm sure their troll count will triple.

At Christmas time, are you all 'Happy Holidizzle' or 'Bah Humbizzle'? Have no idea what I'm talking about? Well, read on...

This year's Christmas campaign from adidas has put a bit of a twist on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and has none other than Snoop Lion, (formerly Snoop Dogg) as the star of the ads. 

The main clip in the star-studded campaign, named The Cautionary Tale of Ebenezer Snoop, is packed full of famous faces.

Gonz, the professional skateboarder, waits on Snoop, performing a trick or two whenever the King of Rap demands it. The ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future also have impressive representatives, played by Stan Smith, David Beckham and Rita Ora/Derrick Rose, respectively.

In a puff of magical smoke from his pipe, Ebenezer Snoop is taken on a journey through time to show him the error of his ways. He used to be a party animal, but now the infamous rapper is losing his touch and his reputation. The ghosts show him what will happen if he stops partying as hard as he used to. The future looks bleak. 

This revamp of the classic literary tale may not be for everyone, but it certainly will be popular among Snoop fans. It seems like he has had a lot of input into the campaign. For example, the short film is exactly 4.20 mins in length...