Like most of you, I have a mental filter than enables me to ignore most advertising pitches. TV, radio, online. Whatever. I don’t notice them.

To penetrate the filter the commercial spot needs to be funny or loud or clever … or, in this case, beautiful.

To paraphrase the opening statement by the pitch-perfect voice with the high-rent English accent … There are commercials so perfect, you’d hardly think they were made by humans.

Could an advertising agency actually produce something as awe-inspiring as this 70-second bit for the Omega Co-Axial Chronometer? Or was it some alien who has discovered how to reach into homo sapiens brains and leave them in awe?

It begins with the music. Piano and strings. It is called “Smiling” and was written by a composer named Harry Gregson-Williams. Apparently, some of it was used in the 2004 Denzell Washington movie Man on Fire.

I could listen to the 70 seconds in the commercial once an hour for a month. I’m whistling it right this moment.

But then we get to the visuals of the commercial. Have another look, then come back.

It begins with the ticking watch, which is pleasant enough in itself. Perhaps it reminds us of our mother’s heartbeat, when we were in the womb.

Then the scene begins to morph. The gears are actually underwater. We see fish and a diver and boats. And wait! All those images are portrayed as mechanical, as well. The America’s Cup-style racing boat is particularly clever, all spinning dials, human and nautical.

Then we come to some sort of shore that to me says “Venice” — and I’m not quite sure why. (Maybe it’s the statue of the rearing horse.) And we see two automobiles, and the second clearly is running (smoothly, of course) on a track.

Which shifts into four metal cyclists on bicycles riding in a velodrome that, oh, yeah, is supposed to be the face of a watch! Notice the numbers?

And if that is not all ingenious enough, then comes the grand ending. The cyclists seem to disappear under a canopy of some sort, that soon appears to be gears … which as the “camera” pulls back shows what is a mechanical fan … which we see is part of the lunar landing module, circa 1969, complete with astronaut.

Meantime, the background has coalesced into planet Earth, and we can see Eurasia and then Africa … and the “camera” continues to pull back and we see the whole of the solar system depicted, spinning and clicking and ticking in perfect harmony …

And, oh, this is about a watch.

The Best Commercial Ever. Made in 2013, and still popping up, as we near the end of 2014.

Certainly the best commercial I have seen in the past decade, anyway.

It doesn’t make me want to buy the watch. But it leaves me feeling respect for the people in “creative”. Hey, we watch Mad Men, too, and this thing is better than Don Draper’s pitch for the Kodak Carousel. Season 1, Episode 13, entitled The Wheel.

Who came up with this? Who signed off on it? I can’t imagine anyone argued over this for more than 10 seconds.

I wonder how much air time it got in the States. Hard to imagine it ran at the full 70 seconds much of anywhere. I was lucky enough to see it while watching CNN, over here, and CNN doesn’t at all mind running advertisements that last more than a minute, especially when that company (Omega) is the sponsor for a regular feature called The Art of Movement.