Overview

In October 2024, I was engaged to design and direct the visual side of a major out-of-home campaign for Anthropic, promoting Claude for Enterprise during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. The campaign ran across Harry Reid International Airport and the Las Vegas Strip during conference week — December 2 through 6 — reaching the full population of enterprise decision-makers in the city for one of the technology industry’s most important annual events.

My role covered the full visual direction of the campaign, including defining the visual language, designing the system across all placements, and creating the animation.

The Brief

The campaign needed to accomplish something very specific: drive enterprise buyers to Anthropic’s re:Invent booth without naming the conference or referencing AWS directly in the creative itself.

 The target audience was mid‑funnel — people who were aware of Claude but viewed it as interchangeable with other large language models. The campaign therefore needed to cut through the noise of conference week and land a clear message: Claude is different.

The tone established in the brief was playful and intelligent — willing to poke fun at the tech industry’s habits while maintaining credibility with enterprise decision-makers.

The Idea

At the first briefing meeting I proposed a visual direction inspired by Saul Bass.

Bass’s work — particularly the title sequences and poster campaigns he designed for filmmakers like Hitchcock and Preminger — communicates complex ideas through simple graphic shapes, bold colour, and typography treated as image. The approach felt directly relevant to the challenge: clear, confident, immediately legible, and dramatically different from the default visual language of AI marketing.

Most AI campaigns rely on blue gradients, neural‑network diagrams, and abstract futurism. Using that visual language would have undermined the message before anyone read the headline. The Saul Bass reference offered the opposite — graphic clarity and human warmth.

Anthropic’s existing brand palette of terracotta and cream already lived naturally within that mid‑century design world, making the direction feel like a discovery within the brand rather than an imposed aesthetic.

The System

The campaign visual system was built around three elements:

• The Claude head silhouette 

• The hand‑drawn asterisk mark 

• Flat terracotta and cream colour fields

The silhouette became the campaign’s central image — human, recognizable, and visually distinct from anything else in AI marketing.

The system alternated between terracotta and cream backgrounds to create visual variety while maintaining coherence across placements. A subtle paper texture introduced warmth against the precision of the digital animation.

The Work

Animation

The animated units were designed as :15 loops used across Strip-facing digital screens and airport digital networks. Each loop begins on the Claude logo, pushes through the asterisk mark as a portal into the campaign world, and moves through the graphic space before resolving back to the full silhouette.

 The copy exists within this space, drifting across the frame as the camera moves through it, creating depth within an otherwise flat graphic environment. The movement was choreographed to a music track I selected, allowing the animation rhythm to drive the pacing of the message.

Airport Spectacular

One of the largest placements was a backlit horizontal installation in the airport baggage claim area measuring nearly 41 feet wide. The composition stretched the headline across the full span of the space with the Claude silhouette anchoring the left side and the brand lockup resolving the right.

Wall Wraps

 The airport tram corridor used portrait-format wall wraps. These executions paired the silhouette motif with individual headlines, allowing the graphic system to scale naturally within the architecture of the space.

Strip Screens

 Digital screens on the Las Vegas Strip placed the campaign in one of the most visually competitive advertising environments in the world. Surrounded by casino signage and entertainment advertising, the Claude campaign did the opposite of everything around it — using restraint, bold shapes, and minimal copy to stand apart.

The Outcome

The campaign ran across Las Vegas during AWS re:Invent 2024, reaching thousands of enterprise technology decision-makers arriving for the conference.

By introducing a confident graphic language that broke from typical AI marketing aesthetics, the work created a distinctive city‑scale presence for Claude and reinforced Anthropic’s positioning as a more human approach to artificial intelligence.

In collaboration with Clark Morgan / The Gordon Agency

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