Mike CohenJun 1
Fuck this.
Show threadMurdoc Addams 🧛🏻 🇨🇦

@mikec415
Is this even real? Because it makes no sense. First of all, why advertise "don't hire humans" and then show smiling humans? But more than that, the target audience is clearly other businesses, so why place this on a billboard? Billboards are for reaching large groups of consumers. And in a residential area no less? Lots of CEOs live in this neighborhood that couldn't be more narrowly targeted?

This would make more sense if it was fake, designed to invoke the very responses we're seeing in the comments here. Then it all makes sense.

----

OK, so I just checked it out. It is real, and not. I mean, it was put out by that company, but indeed as rage-bait:

"We didn’t expect people to get so mad. The goal of the campaign was always to rage bait, but we never expected the level of backlash we ended up seeing.

Luckily, the people who were mad aren’t our target audience. We target tech companies, and the vast majority of people who work at and run tech companies loved the campaign. We received 100s of messages of support and 1000s of sales meeting bookings from people in our ICP.

Finally, we learned that when something works, double down. Each time the campaign got attention, we amplified it instead of retreating. This turned critics into unwitting marketing allies and kept the momentum going far longer than we expected."

From: https://www.artisan.co/blog/stop-hiring-humans

Congratulations humans, your anger has been successfully turned into profit. Good job.

#CriticalThinking #MediaLiteracy

The Story Behind the “Stop Hiring Humans” Billboards in San Francisco

A controversial billboard campaign in San Francisco featuring the provocative message 'Stop Hiring Humans' generated millions of impressions, sparked heated debate, and drove $2M in new ARR for Artisan. Here's the story.

Artisan
Jun 1 at 12:10pmWeb
Show threadGilgwath5d ago
@murdoc @mikec415 We might not be the "target audience", but we are most definitely the target. The press statement kind of says "lol, workers are mad. That's cute.". It's the billionaires advertising the disposal of the working class and worst part about it is not the billboar. The worst part is that these aren't being vigorously destroyed by the working class.
Show threadMurdoc Addams 🧛🏻 🇨🇦5d ago
@gilgwath @mikec415
But public rage was the entire point, they even said as much, and they profited from it. Destroying the billboards wouldn't have changed anything. They demonstrated yet another way that they can manipulate people and profit. They don't even need to hide the fact.
Show threadGilgwath5d ago
@murdoc @mikec415 they can only do shit like this because it has no consequences. If the working class was out there awake, fighting for their rights, they wouldn't think this is a good idea. They would know that this kind of shit would get torn apart the moment it was put up. Public rage is a joke to them, because public rage is a joke these days.