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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain what's wrong with the ad? Is it that hotel taxes don't necessarily go to libraries?

Here's an excerpt from the librarian's Facebook post that went viral:

"Out of your $12 mil of hotel tax, only 1.4% percent goes to the SF Public Libraries. So that's $168,000. Divided by the 868 library staff, we have $193 per person. Assuming each employee works 5 days per week minus holidays, this is $0.78 per employee per day. Since that's significantly under San Francisco minimum wage ($12.25/hr), I doubt that your hotel tax can keep the libraries open more than a minute or two later.

However, had you donated that $8 million you spent fighting Proposition F directly to the public libraries you love so much, that could have made a bigger difference. Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20!"

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100700506082939

Also note the comment: "what a smug, shitty ad"

Ah, thanks! As someone unfamiliar with how taxes are used in SF this ad seemed completely fine to me but after hearing how the taxes are really provisioned this is obviously really misleading.

That's a silly argument. The point of the ad is that the hotel taxes allow the city to offer better public services. Of course if your analysis only considers 1.4% of the tax money you'll find the benefits aren't that impressive. But then you have to account for what the other 98.6% of the money is doing: presumably providing other public services!

If SF spent the whole $12 million on libraries, that would be $55/employee/day, which seems plenty to keep libraries open for an extra few hours. Even if SF only spent "some" of the money on libraries, as the ad suggested, even spending $3 million would come to $14/employee/day which seems enough for a meaningful expansion of services.

That "silly" argument is directly refuting the silly specificity on the silly poster.

Maybe I'm the one confused here, but your response doesn't make sense to me -- it's like you're almost agreeing with the librarian but you don't think you are. Airbnb "started it" by focusing on one specific service (libraries) and humble-brag-whining about how it better improve because they/customers are paying so much. It makes perfect sense then to show how that one specific service Airbnb singled out will not be able to achieve what Airbnb says it should, because it doesn't get nearly as much money as Airbnb implied by tossing around a huge number.

As to hypothetical numbers at the end, why? The percentage the libraries get is fixed by the city, presumably...

P.S. Apparently they have variations of the ad for other services. Maybe on some, however they phrased it makes more sense, but not really in the libraries' case.

P.P.S There is actually a small fallacy/glossing-over in the librarian's argument: the $12MM (or 1.4% thereof) is (presumably) an increase that Airbnb can claim credit for. But theoretically the library could have other sources of income that together would allow for more opening hours. I guess the assumption is that they don't have a lot of surplus.

That's an incoherent argument when Air B&B has other ads touting their support of other government services. Splitting them up with arbitrary large amounts makes their contribution to the tax coffers seem larger than it is.

If they're suggesting they are paying so much taxes that (among other things) the library can now offer longer hours the librarian's post is a pretty straightforward approach of how you should analyze it.

I agree that the ad is tone deaf, but this criticism is not relevant. AirBNB doesn't determine how much of its taxes go to libraries, and the $8m they've spent fighting Prop F probably pales in comparison to what the hotel lobby has spent.

Here's some info on the amount that has been spent on advertising on Prop F.

http://ballotpedia.org/City_of_San_Francisco_Initiative_to_R...

Reported financing in favor or prop F is $354,398 raised, $354,398 spent (these numbers are in the link above).

Against prop F has raised $8,432,791 and spent $3,601,423.

It's $193 which is more than nothing but not much...but there are also a lot of other business taxes that pay for the library - what businesses are all the other contributions coming from?

Without having looked at the numbers, my knee-jerk interpretation of the ad was "The gummint is taking OUR HARD-EARNED MONEY and just giving it to LIBRARIES, and the damned things AREN'T EVEN OPEN LATE."

There are less awful interpretations, but most people don't spend a lot of time pondering the implications of bus station ads; they really should have known better than to run something that could possibly be interpreted that way. And I can't think of any interpretations that are actually positive. I mean, at root, they're trying to remind us that they pay taxes which are spent on government services. And...what? So does everybody else. We're supposed to praise them? Feel sorry for them?

> I can't think of any interpretations that are actually positive.

I can think of what they might've been aiming for. My read is that it was attempting to come off as cutesy/joking but didn't pull it off. I think I've seen this ad style before, though I'm drawing a blank on a good example. A fake "you're welcome" from a brand, "You're welcome for [thing], make sure to spend/not spend it [in accordance with knowing in-joke]. Love, Your Friends at Brand".

The problem here was that instead of cutesy in-joke, it came off as a mix of smug on one hand, and complaining about libraries on the other, which isn't really the right tone for what the campaign is trying to achieve. One thing I'd be curious about is where the ads originated. Is it AirBnB itself being tone-deaf, or did they contract the campaign out to an ad agency that bungled it?

Their other ads say things like "Don't spend it all in one place." So I think the smug interpretation wasn't far off.

It makes airbnb seem petty and misguided... why the hell would you go after libraries anyone? Like they wouldn't want to offer a better service if they had better funding?

It also makes you wonder if this is the best argument they have, their position must be pretty poor.

It's super negative and doesn't fit the Airbnb brand. I mean you could imagine Uber taking a combative tone like this, but this ad is like watching your parents fight.

Funny, the first thing this ad reminded me of was Uber's marketing strategy. They just do a better job of getting the public on side than this ad did.

Mostly because when Uber's marketing gets hostile they at least go after ostensible bad actors.

In this case AirBnb seems to be taking their frustrations out on an innocent third party that has nothing to do with their regulatory/taxation woes, and doing so in a condescendingly smug way.

An ad that targets hotels would still be pretty hostile and probably come off as petty also, but at the very least it would be targeting someone who actually has something to do with the issue.

Who the hell has an axe to grind with public libraries?

[edit] Oof, it gets a bit worse:

http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2015/10/21/passive-aggress...

"A follow up email, explaining that we were in fact seeking confirmation as to whether the ads are actually from Airbnb received the following response: "Are you seriously writing on this?""

So not only did they issue a bunch of petty, passive-aggressively condescending ads, they seemed to have no idea why anyone would find it in poor taste.

I don't think the ad is that bad in the world of smear campaigns. But it is a smear campaign, which is very unlike Airbnb. All I hope is that they return to their higher standards of respect for the community - it's a principal that enables a business like theirs in the first place.

This is what resonated poorly for me. Airbnb has numerous advantages over hotels that they can put into ads. No part of this ad compels me to stay at an Airbnb, and it makes them seem petty/smug.

This ad isn't targeted at potential customers of Airbnb, but the voters of San Francisco who will be voting on this proposition. The only reason you're even seeing it, is because some resident of the city posted a photo online to complain about it.

Yeah, and of all things - public libraries? Come on.

> But it is a smear campaign, which is very unlike Airbnb.

Why is it "unlike" Airbnb? Airbnb's very roots color it as being dodgy, with growth hacking techniques like spamming Craigslist and all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbnb#Use_of_spam

This is a good point you raise. Violating Craigslist's terms, playing business hardline, and the other issues presented on that wiki section are indeed controversial. But I'm pretty okay with letting them slide in pursuit of Airbnb's broader mission. What I'm not okay with is calling out other groups of people. Airbnb is about opening your home up to others, but their latest actions are the very antithesis of that spirit. Intergroup attacks are a new low for Airbnb.

It's a shallow attempt to influence the vote.

Passive-aggressive bitching about taxes.

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