Comically Idiotic List of Advertising's '500 Under 500' Spoofs the Industry's Love of Rankings

McCann creatives take aim at tradition

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There's no shortage of lists ranking ad people—people profess to hate them, but of course, everybody reads them. And now, Lex Singer and Jesse Yowell have unveiled the bloated, bloviating mother of them all—the 500 Under 500. That's right, 500 people, each of them under 500 years old, who are doing great and/or really innocuous things in the business.

"We saw how seriously people take all these industry lists, so we wanted to make the most absurd version of it possible," says Singer, a copywriter who partners with Yowell, an art director, at McCann New York.

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