Spend enough time looking at the billboards in San Francisco and you start to feel like you’re losing your mind. What the hell is an “enterprise experience platform?” you mutter to yourself as you squint at a gigantic billboard next to a busy freeway. You catch yourself wondering if maybe you should be trying to 10x your customer relationships.
San Francisco is overrun by billboards like these—billboards for AI and AI-associated services, billboards for “business software,” billboards for different corporate credit card providers. Let’s call this phenomenon “B2B Slop”, where B2B refers to businesses that provide goods and services to other businesses. More broadly, these are Ads That Are Not For You.
If you’re not in the market for what these ads are selling, or even if you don’t understand what they are selling, don’t worry, you’re not alone.
Many others who see these ads have a similar reaction. Of the people who do understand, only a tiny minority of them, namely those who have decision-making power to make large purchases for their employer, are actually in a position to buy these products.
For everyone else, the proliferation of these incomprehensible tech billboards seems quite strange. Billboards are, recall, large display advertisements located in high-traffic areas that are meant to be seen by a mass audience. How did the billboards of San Francisco come to be taken over by brash promises for niche products that are indecipherable and unactionable for the majority of the viewers? Whatever happened to selling consumer goods to the general public? There are ads for iPhones and Nikes here, of course, but they are crowded out by a colossal variety of ads featuring inscrutable tech jargon.
The simple explanation is an obvious one: because B2B sales is an extremely profitable industry. Even if the vast majority of the people who see any given billboard are not potential buyers of that product, if even a single person is influenced into purchasing, that could cover the cost of renting the billboard, and more. Especially if that one person signs a large contract that brings in a lot of annual recurring revenue. If a company is trying to reach people who are in the market for the specific kind of B2B product they’re selling, a billboard on the 101 isn’t a bad idea; maybe there are only a dozen of those people in the world, but they all probably live nearby, and they’ll probably see it on their way to work. It’s expensive, sure, but if it translates into sales, it’s worth it.
Even if there’s no direct correlation with sales, these billboards can still be a good investment. Maybe it boosts employee morale to see their employer’s logo looming over their commute. An especially clever billboard campaign might lead an impressionable venture capitalist to think, Wow, this company is killing it, I should get in on their next fundraising round, thereby leading to a higher valuation at the next raise. It could happen. The economics of the tech industry are a little abstract, more a matter of hope and optics than of reality.
If enough wealthy people believe that some idea will change the world, then it will raise money accordingly. There’s an alchemy happening, behind the scenes. And this city is no stranger to gold rushes.
That’s the simple answer – the accountant’s truth. The more complicated answer – the ecstatic truth, if you will – is that billboards are the windows to the soul of a region. In Washington D.C. there are defense company billboards that are meant for the small number of government employees who might be in the market for missiles, with everyone else written off as collateral eyeball damage. In Los Angeles there are ‘For Your Consideration’ billboards aimed at Academy members, which also serve to remind everyone else in the entertainment industry of their irrelevance.
In San Francisco, the billboards are telling a story about the dominance of the tech industry. This is a dominance that has waxed and waned, most notably with the dotcom bubble and subsequent crash, but is currently in full swing again; tech billionaires are building skyscrapers, putting their names on hospitals, launching newspapers, and ousting local politicians.
The tech gold rush is alive and well; AI might be the latest buzzword, but there’s plenty of money to be made all around. The various corporations that have emerged out of this boom have planted flags all over town, emblazoning their logos on every conceivable surface: the billboards towering over freeways, the hand-painted ads on downtown office buildings, the LCD screens mounted on top of taxicabs, the branded columns in Muni stations.
These ads might not be for you, but they do have a message for you nonetheless.
And the message is this: if you do not understand these billboards, this city is not for you. You don’t know what an API is? You’re clearly a Luddite, stuck in the analog past. Your economic value is minimal. Why are you still here? This place is for building the future, where everything is shiny and frictionless and all human labor is replaced by AI, which really means a towering stack of B2B software products, each with its own freeway billboard. Get with the program or get out. Build the technology to do “self-driving accounting for startups” or find yourself driven out of your accounting job. And if you think that you’re safe because you’re not an accountant, guess again, because AI is coming for your job, too.
You may be here for now, but this city, this region of the world that has become an epicenter for technological innovation, is not for you. It is for the tech ruling class: the entrepreneurs hacking away at their AI startups and the venture capitalists who fund them from the comfort of their palatial homes. Your job is to serve them. If you’re lucky, some of that wealth will trickle down to you, if you can find a job writing code for them; if you’re less lucky, you’ll have to resign yourself to brewing their lattes or delivering their takeout, for a much smaller trickle. Make one wrong move and you will find yourself priced out of this region entirely, lost to the stream of history, a forgotten human sacrifice at the altar of AI.
That is the story being told by the advertising landscape. This is the public art that the ruling class has to offer, these tacky, smug billboards at the end of history. They are the physical emblem of the material superiority of the tech industry, reminding you who calls the shots around here. The use of internal lingo, which renders the billboards incomprehensible to people outside the industry, is the industry’s way of congratulating itself, celebrating its ability to extract superprofits without even needing the buy-in of the mass consumer. It’s not a coincidence that the billboards themselves are more tangible than any of the actual products they’re advertising – abstraction can be very lucrative, after all.
One day these billboards, along with the tech oligarchs, will topple.
Until then, this regular column for Bay Area Current will keep an eye on them, documenting trends and investigating the companies behind them. Like the sunglasses from John Carpenter’s 1988 film ‘They Live’, my goal is to help you see them through fresh eyes, to understand what they’re really saying. For now, the billboards remain standing. Maybe one day you’ll lend a hand in tearing them down.
Wendy Liu writes about tech billboards for Bay Area Current. She is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism (2020). She is currently working on a novel.
Cuando protestantes quemaron vehículos de Waymo en las calles de Los Ángeles, no se trato de una destrucción descontrolada. Fue un mensaje directo de la clase trabajadora contra la oligarquía tecnológica.
