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In this paper, I examine how successful advertisement films can be understood through the complex thematic progression of the hero’s journey, as it outlined by Joseph Campbell, with theme as the actual hero. As Campbell, Patrick Colm Hogan, and others argue, characters and narrative structures in film and literature adopt global and evolutionary patterns. However, whereas the narratives of successful feature films commonly match inner, physical, and thematic dramatic developments in eleven, seventeen, or twenty-two steps, and forty to sixty scenes, the intense complexity of advertisement films, of six to sixty seconds long, is commonly ignored, and they are often analysed in much simpler terms, on the basis of three or four rhetorical factors and stages.  I have previously argued that the stages of the hero’s journey can be translated into a purely thematic line of argument. In feature films each step in a thematic line of reasoning stretches over several scenes and perhaps ten minutes. In advertisement films the screenwriter may only have a half to three seconds to communicate each step of the rhetorical argument. In this presentation, I apply that model of reasoning to varied Swedish and American examples, ranging from Volvo and Klarna banking, eyeglasses, to Coca-Cola, to demonstrate how the multimodal complexity of award-winning commercials follow universal conventions, regarding perception and narrative structures communicate thematic content, with intense multimodal means. As a result, the presentation advances the notion that quality advertisement films demand complex screenwriting skills, and that the hero´s journey presents a universal tool for the transfer between conventional screenwriting and the production of content for social media