The Story Behind the “Stop Hiring Humans” Billboards in San Francisco
When you drive around San Francisco, you see hundreds of tech billboards all competing for your attention. And most blur together in a sea of generic messaging about AI, cloud computing, and enterprise solutions. It’s undisputedly boring.
When we decided to launch our own outdoor campaign at Artisan, we knew we needed something different. Something that would stand out. Something… provocative. What we didn't know was that our controversial approach would lead to 10s of millions of impressions, 1000s of death threats, 100s of articles and our biggest growth months ever.
Was it worth it? Yes.
The Strategy Behind the Controversy
For most Seed-stage companies, billboard advertising seems counterintuitive and like a waste of money. Why spend money on traditional media when you could be optimizing your CAC on digital channels, with way quicker wins?
But you don’t win by doing the same thing as everyone else. We’re in a hyper-competitive market - our first product, Ava, is an AI SDR. With new AI SDR products popping up every week, we’ve been leaning into using brand as a moat.
We wanted everybody to know who we were and to think of Artisan when they hear “AI Employee”, so billboards seemed like our best bet.
We knew that if we made the billboards as vanilla as everybody else’s, nobody would care. We’d spend $100s of thousands and get nothing in return.
We spent days brainstorming the campaign messaging. We wanted to draw eyes and spark interest, we wanted to cause intrigue with our target market while driving a bit of rage with the wider public. The messaging we came up with was simple but provocative: "Stop hiring humans."
We complimented our core tagline with phrases like "Artisans Won't Complain About Work-Life Balance", “Humans Are So 2023”, “Artisans Won’t Come Into Work Hungover”, “Hire Artisans, Not Humans” and "The era of AI employees is here”, paired with the human appearance of our AI SDR, Ava.
And Then, We Waited…
The first billboard that went up was on the way up to the city from SFO. It read “Stop Hirring Humans” (and yes, the spelling mistake was human error 😉). We timed it so that it went up on the same day as our sponsorship of, and 30x30 booth at, TechCrunch Disrupt.
And boom. It started with a single tweet: "Did I really just see a billboard that said 'Stop Hirring Humans' on the way from SFO airport to the city."
Within days, that tweet reached nearly 5,000 likes, and reached 250,000 people.
And instead of trying to calm the controversy, we doubled down. We posted our own TechCrunch booth on Reddit's r/mildlyinfuriating with the caption “Hired humans telling you to stop hiring humans.”
And again, boom. That post has 35,000 upvotes as of today and millions of impressions. The moderators removed it recently after finding out I posted it…
At that point, we knew we were on to something. We seeded around 20 different subreddits with photos of our billboards, and time after time they went viral.
Over the following few weeks, journalists started flooding our inbox. We got coverage in SF GATE, Breitbart, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, had interview requests from CBS, Fox and more and even made it into HubSpot's newsletter. The campaign had taken on a life of its own.
And here we are today - new social media posts, articles and forums are going viral about the campaign every day. I’ve had hundreds of people send me posts about our billboards they’ve come across organically.
The Results Speak for Themselves
The impact exceeded our wildest expectations. When I meet new people in San Francisco, 70% of the time they know about Artisan and what we do. Before, that number was around 5%. aHrefs ranked us #2 fastest growing AI companies by brand search. We’ve seen 1000s of sales meetings getting booked.
October and November became our biggest months ever, bringing in over $2M in new ARR.
What We Learned
Looking back, a few key insights stand out.
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. Looking forward, we’ll likely tone down the messaging to be more in line with what we actually believe rather than just clickbaiting..!
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.
The Timing Was Unideal - To Say the Least
The UnitedHealthcare CEO’s shooting unexpectedly catalyzed the social media noise about the campaign. Death threats started flooding in across all channels - our website, emails, company social media, and my personal social media. While all of them will be reported to the FBI, some of them were actually pretty funny.
The Truth Is, We Love Humans
We don’t actually want people to stop hiring humans - we’re actively hiring across all roles, and I don’t actually think AI is dystopian. The real goal for us is to automate the work that humans don’t enjoy, and to make every job more human. Nobody wants to spend 8 hours a day researching people and writing outbound emails, so we built Ava to do it for them.
In the long run, the stop hiring humans campaign tagline will have more merit. Inevitably as more and more human productivity is taken over by AI, we should first see a 4-day work week. Eventually, we should live in a world where everyone gets UBI, productivity is driven entirely by robots, we’re all free to do whatever we want and you can truly stop hiring humans, but today is not that day. In my opinion, that day will in fact be utopia.
Shoutout to our awesome team for putting this campaign together! If you want to join us as we build products to augment humans’ jobs, apply here.
Want to see what all the fuss is about? Book a demo and meet Ava, our AI SDR, and judge for yourself whether the future is as dystopian as our billboards suggest.
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