The AI Billboards Are Killing SF
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
But there is something a little...alienating about advertising that's not meant for you.
It's a dumb example, but in Pittsburgh the football stadium was renamed from Heinz Field to Acrisure Stadium.
Of course, "Three Rivers Stadium", the name of the previous building, was best. It's not a name that tries to sell you something. But if you must sell something, "Heinz" is extremely good: it sells products for everyone, and it has historical roots in the area. Of the people, for the people.
But Acrisure? I've looked it up a few times and I still can't remember exactly what it is. Business services or insurance or something like that. And I'm sure that both Acrisure and the Steelers don't really care that I don't know what it is, because it's not really for the vast majority of the 65,000 people who show up on a Sunday to cheer for the team.
That's...weird.
Otoh maybe I'm looking at it wrong, and maybe billboard advertising has gotten so ineffective that it's cheapened to the point that you can tuck it into your campaign as an afterthought. If you get one solid enterprise lead from it, it pays for the whole year. And besides it has branding value.
Either way, definitely feels a bit dystopian to me. How alienating must it feel for the service worker commuting to his dead end job where even the billboards don't make sense anymore?
I wonder if it's so some brand manager can put "78% of XX managers have heard of our brand" on a slide after running a survey near the billboard
The vast majority of advertising isn't for any specific individual. I've no interest in perfumes, fashion, electric cars or jewellery that feature on boards nearby and I've no idea who the celebrity endorsers are, but why should I care?
But many modern people have a compulsion that they need to be involved in everything, all the time, and anything they don't understand is either mocked or protested. It's a form of entitled self-importance, but what's the cause?
When I was typing my post I thought about billboards for divorce attorneys: I am happily married so those billboards aren't for me, but this fact alone wasn't enough to alter the idea behind my post. And I guess I should also note that I did not demand that all billboards cater exclusively to my interests, that is obviously unworkable nonsense.
So let me try to refine:
Public advertising is...public. "of or concerning the people as a whole"; "exposed to general view", to pick two dictionary definitions. Billboards and stadiums occupy public spaces, places you walk or drive by all the time, so one could reasonably intuit that they should be representative of the people who inhabit those spaces.
Analogies don't usually help, but let me try: If a city had 90% of its inhabitants speaking German, you would expect most of the signage and advertising to be in German. An Italian speaker would arrive in the city and just feel that the place was...different, not for them. (It would not be "entitled self-importance" to say so.)
If a city was 90% German speakers, 10% French speakers, and the signage and advertising was all in French - what would the visiting Italian speaker make of that? Would a group of Germans in town rightly be accused of "entitled self-importance" for asking that the world around them is accessible?
Regular people have no relevant political power and no relevant economic power, and the people in power have stopped pretending that we do.
The world is not for us, we don't even matter enough to have billboards advertising to us anymore.
You're far, far more likely to get fatty liver disease from products sold by companies like Diageo and Bacardi.
It’s maybe got slightly more extreme recently, with an even larger percentage of them being inscrutable to me as someone who both works in tech and has a decent grasp of current industry trends.
I’ve never really got it — if even I don’t know what you’re advertising (or often, who is advertising!), how does this help your sales?
Making their sales peoples job easier, in particular, can be a lot cheaper than getting the marketing on its own to sell someone on you. They want you to go "oh, yes, FooBar Inc, I recognise that name" instead of your reaction being "who?!?".
A lot of marketing without calls to action fall in the latter two categories. In that case they don't need to tell you who they are. They just need you to notice that they're there enough that they seem like a player that is a good choice. You don't even necessarily want to come across as caring too much about explaining who you are - you just want to portray the silent confidence of someone buyers should already know.
(I have no idea whether the specific billboards you're talking about succeed at this)
I don't even think that's an exaggeration. I watched a YouTube video about a startup that wanted to land a major client, figured out the CTO's commute, and put up billboards along the way.
Then they called the guy and he told them "I see your ads everywhere." They had an in.
The economics likely make sense when a contract is easily worth tens of millions of dollars. They're trying to create the perception that they're established in the mind of one person.
Advertisers target the people likely to see the ad and spend money on the topic. Billboards are extremely geographically restricted, so local interest dominates. This isn't really news.
And yes, they are annoying.
They must work, because they're buying the ad space for about three relevant people.
But there aren't very many blue collar tech jobs beyond security and the cafeterias. It undoubtedly feels like an invasive species for much of the lower middle class, who's been here longer than the tech workers.
Have you ever driven through farm country? I do fairly regularly (on an interstate). There's like one billboard for a (cattle) vet on my route. Most ads are for restaurants, healthcare, and the regular stuff.
And if that is the argument, there are plenty of local business billboards in the Bay Area as well.
I don't have an argument, it's just what you describe doesn't match my experience.
We saw a Sees Candies : No AI needed billboard yesterday. Thought that was funny.
There’s another one out there that goes AI Dread? Call 1-800-HELP-MEE or something like that. Pity I was driving. Would have liked to have seen what that was.
This is some low quality bait.
[Billboards stop targeting you at all.]
Ads no longer influence us to buy things we don't need! This is terrible!
Just take the win.
While you can generally restrict new ones, you can't eliminate existing ones without basically paying out the lost revenue+etc to whoever is running it.
They have not gone extinct.
It's not a government problem - it's a constitutional one - Banning existing billboards is considered both a first amendment problem, and a takings problem.
Doing it without compensation is a constitutional violation, and even if california modified it's constitution, it would be a federal one. Less of one for sure, but still an issue.
The current law (Business & Professions Code § 5412) is a codification of what the court requires.
>Doing it without compensation is a constitutional violation, and even if california modified it's constitution, it would be a federal one.
Only matters if the constitution is enforced. Courts can easily overturn previous decisions. If there's a will, there's a way.
Business & Professions Code § 5412 is the current controlling statute, and that is a codification of what the courts have required.
That requirement is not just a california constitutional problem, but a federal one.
So even if you modified the california constitution, you'd still have the federal problem.
The federal problem is much less than the state one (SCOTUS has found the floor here to be quite low), but it's still bad enough that feds require compensation as well. Just less compensation.
For example, 23 U.S.C. § 131(g) conditions federal highway funds on paying just compensation for removals along Interstate and federal-aid primary highways — 10% of apportionment forfeited otherwise.
I looked into this quite heavily, and had long discussions with legislators, because there was a huge ugly billboard 150 feet from my house in San Jose :)
I believe regulatory changes similar to what you propose have been ruled takings in the past. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the state would lose, but this supreme court doesn’t seem particularly amenable.
My favorite billboard was in Silicon Valley, not SF, back in the early 90s when people around here still cared about technology: “high speed analog simulation.” If you needed that, the billboard was for you! Nobody complained. The same year I decided my company would show job ads before the movies at century 16 (next to where Google now is). The lady who took the ss ws dubious, but our first (“can you program in C++? Looking for a job? Write to jobs@cygnus.com). It made the NYT, but then became commonplace and now nobody looks for jobs that way. Sic transit gloria mundi
* I assume this is a service that teaches them empathy and how to listen.
Do the exact opposite of what the majority of the "AI billboards" are saying.
Job done.