Sometimes, you can’t help but laugh-cry-scream at clever marketing that marks a march toward a human-less future.
Whatever physical film and television advertisements are for Los Angeles is what tech publicity is for San Francisco. It’s increasingly impossible to avoid human-sized posters of tech companies pushing anything and everything AI — even at the expense of human jobs.
The sheer saturation of advertisements is laughable (in the most dystopian kind of way). But every once in a while, one tech ad separates itself from the proverbial fray, and it does so by some semblance of shock-and-awe or laudable wit.
In the case of the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company Delve, a quippy banner smeared on the side of a Muni 24 Divisadero has us nodding and saying internally, “OK, fine … you ate that.”
“I feel so San Francisco,” reads a post on Threads by user [at]brandonkhill. Attached to the post is an image showing an ad that reads “Get GDPR done faster than a Waymo blocks the bike lane” from Delve.
Delve is no stranger to guerrilla marketing strategies. The AI company’s pitch to streamline compliance is on billboards all over the South of Market neighborhood. (As highlighted by a spectacularly somber column by SFGATE journalist Ariana Bindman, Delve’s AI promotions exist in the larger landscape of anti-human messages strung across advertisements in San Francisco — leaving us all nostalgic for laughably ludicrous tech publicity of years past.)
If and when the robots do take over, let’s just hope they’ll allow us a rare hushed chuckle at their expense.
