Top 7 Commercials Made by Chicago Agencies: The City's Best Video Advertising

Chicago invented modern advertising, then spent decades being treated as a stop between New York and Los Angeles. That framing is out of date. As a Chicago video production company, we work in a city with Super Bowl-winning agencies, new state film incentives, and a crew base deep enough to shoot anything a coastal market can.

Every commercial below was created by a Chicago agency, for national brands that could have hired anyone: a singing hairball, a rubber fish on a road trip, Batman arguing with Jason Bateman, and a KFC nugget mock-drama. The thinking is Chicago's; the shoots travelled wherever each script needed them to.

Here are seven of the best Chicago commercials worth studying, analyzed from a production perspective.

1. Manscaped: A Power Ballad Sung by Body Hair

For Super Bowl LX in February 2026, Manscaped made its national debut with "Hair Ballad": clumps of freshly shaved body hair, anthropomorphised into sad-eyed monsters, crooning a breakup song to the men who removed them as they swirl toward the drain.

Chicago's Quality Meats, founded by co-chief creative officers Gordy Sang and Brian Siedband, deliberately avoided the standard Big Game formula of stacked celebrity cameos, and directors The Perlorian Brothers (MJZ) played the melodrama completely straight, which is why the grotesque premise reads as charming rather than gross.

The takeaway: commit to a single strange image and cast it seriously. In a Super Bowl break full of famous faces, the weirdest character on screen is the one people describe to their friends on Monday.

2. Jeep: Big Mouth Billy Bass Goes Home

Chicago independent agency Highdive, the shop behind years of Super Bowl chart-toppers, took the singing rubber fish from a thousand 1999 basements and gave it a redemption arc: Billy escapes the wall, rides in a Jeep Cherokee, and finally reaches the river.

Director Jim Jenkins (O Positive) shot it with an AI-forward production methodology, rendering much of the animal work digitally rather than staging it on location, which is how a nostalgic gag stays inside a sane budget. It became the top automotive performer on YouTube AdBlitz for 2026.

The takeaway: nostalgia objects are free casting. A prop your audience already owns emotionally does the work of a celebrity fee.

3. State Farm: Batman Versus Bateman

Highdive's other signature client is State Farm, and this one stages a showdown between Batman and Jason Bateman, with SZA, Kai Cenat, Jordan the Stallion, and Jake from State Farm all pulled into an argument built on a pun.

The whole idea rests on one phonetic coincidence, which is exactly the kind of premise that collapses without precise casting and comic timing. Bateman plays it dry, the celebrity roster is used sparingly rather than stacked, and the insurance point still lands inside the joke.

The takeaway: a wordplay premise needs an actor who underplays it. The more absurd the setup, the flatter the performance has to be.

4. GoDaddy: Walton Goggins Fakes It Until the AI Makes It

Back to Quality Meats, whose Super Bowl work for GoDaddy sold the Airo AI tool through a single human truth: everyone starting a business is bluffing, and the tagline says so out loud. Walton Goggins builds a company on camera while the platform generates the website, logo, social posts, and ads around him.

For a software demo, the structure is unusually generous to the viewer. The product does the work in the background while the performance carries the front, so nothing on screen feels like a screen recording.

The takeaway: name the feeling your customer will not admit to. "Act like you know" works because every founder in the audience has done exactly that.

5. KFC: Saucy Nuggets, Played as Melodrama

Leo Burnett Chicago, the agency that gave the world Tony the Tiger and the Pillsbury Doughboy, still does what it has always done well: build a product launch around a single character-driven comic conceit rather than a feature list.

The craft note worth stealing is casting and comic timing. Fast-food advertising lives or dies on performance, and the edit rhythm is built around reactions, not product shots.

The takeaway: for food, film the eating, not the packaging. Appetite appeal is a performance problem before it is a lighting problem.

6. Tillamook: "Extraordinary Dairy"

Also from Leo Burnett Chicago, this campaign sells a dairy co-op on craft rather than price, with cinematography that treats farmland, cows, and cheese-making the way a food documentary would.

For any producer working with an agricultural or manufacturing client, this is the reference: natural light, real locations, macro texture, and a pace slow enough to let the material look expensive.

The takeaway: premium is a shooting style. If the strategy is quality, the camera has to prove it before the voiceover claims it.

7. Huggies: "Snug & Dry"

Leo Burnett Chicago's Huggies work solves the hardest production problem in the category: filming babies, who do not take direction, in a way that demonstrates a functional product benefit without looking clinical.

The answer is coverage and patience. Long shooting days, multiple cameras, and an edit built from moments rather than a storyboard, which is precisely how documentary crews work.

The takeaway: when your talent cannot be directed, shoot like a documentary and cut like a comedy. Plan for volume, not for perfect takes.

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What unites these seven Chicago commercials? Not one of them is about Chicago. They are Super Bowl spots, national launches, and long-running platforms for Manscaped, Jeep, State Farm, GoDaddy, KFC, Tillamook, and Huggies, all made by agencies working out of the same city. That is the actual argument for briefing a Chicago agency: national-standard work without a coastal address.

If you need that kind of work, our Chicago video production company team is ready to be your partner, from a single social spot to a full campaign. Our guides to video formats for Chicago businesses and Chicago video production prices are a good place to start before you brief anyone. Let's discuss your next project. For more ideas, case studies, and trends from the world of video marketing, follow us on LinkedIn.