Design agency Collins created Intercom’s simple billboards as a thought experiment on clarity and sincerity.
Every time someone flies in to visit me in San Francisco, they inevitably ask, “What’s up with all these weird ads?”
There’s a sea of gobbledygook on the region’s buses, transit stops and highways. And it seems to be transmitting secret messages to a chosen few, with the rest of us relegated to bystanders in some larger conspiracy that runs on passcodes and intricate handshakes.
“Do you need swifter end-of-year SGLs? The best CCSOs use LithurionAI!”
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Lately, I’ve been fixated on this one billboard that I see every time I drive westward on the Bay Bridge.
“1. Intercom is a complete customer service platform
2. Intercom is the leader in AI for customer service”
It’s a white field with a numbered list in black text, and it’s an advertisement for some company that provides backend software or something for other companies.
Whatever it is, it is very much Not For Me. But my mind, heavily stimulated by whatever concert or party I’ve just torn myself away from, latches onto this sign as a person might gulp a bland glass of milk after eating a terrifically spicy pepper.
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If you think glass-and-steel modernist condominiums are uninspiring, the billboard is that plus a double dose of Xanax.
In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant wrote that what philosophers called the “sublime” was distinct from beauty, in that it articulated an awe of something that surpasses what the human mind can fully conceive. In the 21st century, marketers and headline writers coined “curiosity gap,” or the missing information that might compel your audience to click on a link or Google a term.
The San Francisco billboard, in all of its straightforwardness, is the opposite of all that: anti-sublime, anti-mystery, a void of interest.
Love them or hate them, billboards have cast their shadows over urban America for two centuries now, shilling wares as diverse as wheat flour, eternal salvation and legal services to generations of drivers stuck in rush hour traffic. I’m often charmed by billboards and public ads, and I think they say so much about the places they preside over. They promote regional unity, giving us all campy characters to talk about — New York City’s impossibly smooth-skinned dermatologist, Dr. Zizmor; the subject of Philadelphia’s mysterious (but very Philly) “I hate Steven Singer” signs; and, my favorite, San Francisco’s doyenne of personal injury litigation, Anh Phoong. As part of the urban mise en scène, these advertisements play a part in establishing what a place is all about.
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So, what does the white sign say about the Bay Area?
On the surface, that billboard comes off as an extension of how anti-fashion has become the fashion in the tech worlds of Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Think Steve Jobs’ trademark black mock turtleneck, its affected simplicity mimicked by wannabes, like convicted Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, as a shortcut for technological genius. In baggy T-shirts and cargo shorts that seemed fished out of a laundry basket, tech billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried was an icon of the big-pictured-focused-tech billionaire who transcended worldly aesthetic concerns. (That is until he was also convicted of fraud.)
But much like the fact that Jobs’ simple turtleneck just so happened to be a custom-designed Issey Miyake garment, the simplicity of the billboard is very much an expensive put-on.
“That ad was actually done with us,” said Brian Collins, founder of the eponymous Collins, a 9-year-old design agency that led campaigns for institutions like the San Francisco Symphony, the Exploratorium and KALW. “That billboard is informed by the work we have been doing with Intercom. But that execution in particular was designed by Intercom’s CEO Eoghan McCabe and their creative director Scott Smith.”
“We wanted to do it as a protest against all the nonsense that’s happening in tech marketing and advertising, most of which is unforgivably bad,” said Collins when I called him up. Ads, he said, are mostly a retina-burning battle between marketers that doesn’t serve the public one whit. “We were so insulted by the pomposity, the posing and the visual assault of so much of that work in the city,” he said.
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The billboard was a thought experiment: “A comment about how stupid all that stuff is that just wipes the slate clean and starts with clarity — and maybe even sincerity.” Collins pointed out that, if the ad didn’t work, I wouldn’t be talking to him at all.
He got me there.
While his points made sense, I couldn’t help but ponder what the city would look like if other companies followed the agency’s lead. Yes, billboards are all crass, sensory assaults on all that is good and beautiful, snatching up precious swaths of the horizon for the sake of commerce. Still — maybe it’s just me — but I would miss the Zizmors, the Singers and the Phoongs of the world were they to disappear. Even if I don’t want what they’re selling, they make a city a little bit sillier.
Reach Soleil Ho (they/them): soleil@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hooleil
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