The fight over digital ad space and the struggle to monetize free smartphone apps consumes a great deal of Silicon Valley’s time. But it turns out that some of the most sought-after advertising real estate is also some of the most old-fashioned: highway billboards on 101.
Bloomberg News reports that there are now six-month waiting lists for some “Gold Coast” boards, and that currently, one of them is a 50-foot-high ad for Dice.com with Alex, a nerdy looking coder lying suggestively on his side in polka-dot undies. A bro-dalisque, if you will. With a smartwatch. Dice might be paying up to $40,000 per month for commuters to gaze at the negative space between his thighs.
“We wanted to make people smile when they were stuck in traffic,” said Natasha Raja, Dice’s VP of marketing. Added to that, it’s a nice turnaround on the usual sexist iconography found in visual advertising, but also a win for anyone who likes to see regular people in ads from time to time.
Valleywag’s Kevin Montgomery took offense, saying, “Silicon Valley is so flush with cash, tech companies are assaulting motorists’ eyes with billboards of emaciated engineers for the fuck of it.” I respectfully disagree here. Is the sight of an ordinary-looking human so abhorrent? Do we need airbrushed Adonises advertising everything? [Full disclosure: I’m a bespectacled white nerd, but I’m also like 25 pounds heavier than that Alex, who is definitely not emaciated.] And Dice told Bloomberg the next ad will feature an engineer who looks like George Costanza.
The Bay Area has been home to some pretty terrible billboards lately, as well as amazing ads for chiropractors endorsed by lucha libre heroes. In the end, this one’s pretty minor compared to that campaign claiming the end of the world was coming on May 21, 2011. Those were the best.