BA/RS
Don’t Be A Relic
A creepy museum guide shows teens the relics of B2B sales.
Watch the full campaign
The Strategy
BA/RS is the Beyond Assembly Roadshow, a free event Acro Commerce runs for B2B manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers. Attendees see real companies that changed how they sell, learn which tools work well together, and talk it over at the bar. There's always a bar.
The museum started as one of the ideas we pitched Acro for its own ads. Acro picked the talk show instead, but its team kept coming back to the museum. Once we were into Acro's scripts, they found the budget to make it too, this time for their roadshow. Same client, same week, two sets of ads with opposite moods: a bright, loud talk show and a dark, creepy museum.
The people Acro wanted in the room know they need to modernize how they sell. They feel lost in all the tech options, and they've sat through plenty of dry industry events. So the ads had to make modern selling feel a little cool, skip the industry jargon, and work for more than one city.
Welcome to the Museum of Bygone Business, where old sales tools, and the companies that clung to them, are kept forever. Jasper, a creepy tour guide in a tweed suit, walks two teens past a fax machine, a Rolodex and a CD labeled "Q4 Reports, Master Copy." He loves every piece. The teens couldn't care less. Every ad ends on the same advice: Don't be a relic.
Our first draft had the teens nervous from the start. In script review, our team pointed out that real teens would be bored, not scared, and would laugh at all of it. So they smirk through the tour until the main spot's ending, when a new exhibit arrives: a crate with a man inside, begging to go digital. That makes the ending land harder.
The 15-second teaser opens the museum with a screeching fax machine and Jasper calling it "the beautiful sound of inefficiency." The 30-second main spot is the full tour. In the 15-second follow-up, Jasper scoffs at a BA/RS ad on his ancient computer. The short reminders find him off duty: humming along to a cassette of hold music, and catching his mannequin girlfriend holding a BA/RS pamphlet.
The Process
We shot it in April 2025, the same week as Acro's talk show, in a studio, with the museum built from our own walls. Spotlights hit each pedestal so the relics glow and everything else falls into shadow. Horror lighting, comedy timing. Our director, Adam, pointed to Scary Movie and What We Do in the Shadows for the tone.
Jasper is a bald cap under long, wispy gray hair, a brown tweed suit and a name tag. The teens wear bright, modern clothes so they pop against the dusty museum.
The museum needed mannequins that sit. Bendable ones cost a fortune, so we found mannequins that come apart at the waist and propped the top half on a chair. One sits wrapped in its own phone cord. Another, in a headset, is Jasper's girlfriend.
That's our co-founder Chandler in the crate. The script had it lying flat. We stood it up so viewers would see right away that a person is inside. Fingers poking through a board could be missed, or take too long to land.
We cut every ad five ways: one for each city (Boston, Dallas and Toronto), one with all three dates, and one with no date so Acro can reuse it for future stops. Each comes in widescreen, square and vertical, with and without subtitles, and sends viewers to DontBeARelic.com. We also made a longer cut of the main spot where Jasper introduces the event's host.
The ads played at all three events in June 2025. Chandler and Dan Sullivan, from our team, were in the room in Boston. Acro ran its own media.
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