Does Rage Bait Work in OOH?

by Amber Larkins, OOH Today

On December 5th, Artisan, an AI startup, launched a controversial campaign on multiple billboards and bus shelters in San Francisco with the tagline, “Stop Hiring Humans.”

Artisan specializes in AI software that offers an artificial intelligence sales agent called Artisan, which finds and warms leads to automate the early part of the sales cycle. Many companies offer similar services for different verticals, but the message threatens jobs traditionally belonging to humans.

Here are some of the other messages featured in the OOH campaign, which targeted tech companies:

• Hirre Artisans, not humans (intentional spelling error meant to mimic human error)
• The era of AI employees is here
• Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance
• Artisan’s Zoom cameras will never ‘not be working’ today

On its website, Artisan says it works with “no human input” and costs “96% less than hiring someone to do her job.”

Amidst tech layoffs and the growing use of AI in the workplace, the campaign’s messaging has upset people across the globe and gained traction on Reddit, spawning tens of millions of impressions, thousands of death threats, and hundreds of articles.

But the rage bait was intentional.

San Francisco has many B2B tech billboards, usually with generic messaging. Artisan wanted to launch a provocative campaign to stand out against the noise.

“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,” said the company’s founder and CEO, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, in a recent blog post on the Artisan website.

Instead of “calming the controversy,” they posted and reposted the billboard campaign on about 20 different subreddits. It went viral every time.

What do you think? Did this campaign hit the mark, or did it go too far?

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