These Statues From Amazon Immortalize Ad-Biz Heroics

What will last of all our toils?

The things distant historians will “remember” about us are likely to be pretty random. So much of what we know of the past—or think we know, anyway—is based on stuff that happened to survive, despite time’s attempts to shave it away.

Your blog or well-curated social media? Unlikely to make the cut. Think more along the lines of Ikea dishes, car parts, lawn gnomes, Legos, Barbies … probably every piece of plastic you’ve ever touched that hasn’t been slowly broken down into plankton food.

Then there’s the statues: of General Custer, George Washington, that horrible gynecology man, various iterations of Medusa and Perseus, the Stock Market Bull, Fearless Girl. We take this habit—trying to chisel some aspect of ourselves, symbolically or otherwise, into stone, praying immortality meets us halfway—from the many civilizations that came before us. We don’t always know why they immortalized the people, stories or entities they did, but we know why we do it.

You know what posterity could use? Statues of ad people. Ad people doing ad things: Staring at computers, eating pizza, “brainstorming.” For its new global brand platform, “Ads That Work as Hard as You Do,” Amazon Ads and Anomaly have created the Museum of Modern Advertisers, a neoclassical attempt to immortalize “the hardworking heroes of marketing and the seemingly ordinary moments that lead to extraordinary work.”

See the gallery below:

Each likeness is flanked by an explanatory plaque. “David vs. 2024” depicts a media planner on a “Goliath annual planning call, balancing reach and frequency metrics as delicately as the phone pressed against his clavicle.” Meanwhile, in “Dante’s Entanglement,” we watch “a marketing manager embark on an epic journey to project his team’s media plan through an entangled labyrinth of remotes, dongles and technological torment.”

The gallery’s pièce de résistance is titled “The Last Run-Through,” which shows a group of marketers making last-minute changes to a pitch deck … probably minutes before the big meeting.

How a guy sitting at a café table, scribbling something “genius” on a napkin, escaped the exhibit we can’t quite say.

Anomaly was charged with developing the gallery and brand activation. Five statues debuted at unBoxed 2023, Amazon Ads’ flagship conference. The sculptures were accompanied by working laptops and speakers, which played soundbites to draw people in. Visitors were invited to “complete” the scenes by posing in them.

Here are a few videos of the action:

CREDITS

Brand: Amazon Ads
Carly Zipp: Director, Brand Marketing
Dipal Shah: Principal, Brand Strategy
Colin Kikcio: Senior Brand Strategist
Alex Andreadis: Brand Manager
Marcellus Neel: Senior Creative Director

Agency: Anomaly
Partner, Chief Innovation Officer: Natasha Jakubowski
Innovation Strategy Director: Justin Alsop
Senior Innovation Strategist Taylor Mclean

Founding Partner, Global Chief Creative Officer, Mike Byrne
Creative Director: Diego Fonseca
Creative Director: Giles Clayton
Art Director: Jessica Leonard
Copywriter: Kat Worrall

Head of Account Management: Elektra O’Malley
Business Director: Rachel Wintle
Account Supervisor: Rachel Zambernardi
Account Executive: Claudia Giblin

Executive Director, Production: Jordan Spielman
Freelance Producer: Neely Lisk

Production Company: Traction3D

Sound House: Sonic Union
Sound Designer & Mix Engineer: Rob DiFondi
Assistant Engineer: Graham Carpenter
Sound Producer: Mary Kate Valentino