"Killing SF" is overly dramatic, and others have noted that the phenomenon observed here is not unique to AI, or SF.
But there is something a little...alienating about advertising that's not meant for you.
It's a dumb example, but in Pittsburgh the football stadium was renamed from Heinz Field to Acrisure Stadium.
Of course, "Three Rivers Stadium", the name of the previous building, was best. It's not a name that tries to sell you something. But if you must sell something, "Heinz" is extremely good: it sells products for everyone, and it has historical roots in the area. Of the people, for the people.
But Acrisure? I've looked it up a few times and I still can't remember exactly what it is. Business services or insurance or something like that. And I'm sure that both Acrisure and the Steelers don't really care that I don't know what it is, because it's not really for the vast majority of the 65,000 people who show up on a Sunday to cheer for the team.
I think you're on to something. It's really concerning that the people with the money to run these ad campaigns are so removed from the bulk of the populace that they don't even bother targeting them with all the billboards anymore, just each other.
Otoh maybe I'm looking at it wrong, and maybe billboard advertising has gotten so ineffective that it's cheapened to the point that you can tuck it into your campaign as an afterthought. If you get one solid enterprise lead from it, it pays for the whole year. And besides it has branding value.
Either way, definitely feels a bit dystopian to me. How alienating must it feel for the service worker commuting to his dead end job where even the billboards don't make sense anymore?
"But there is something a little...alienating about advertising that's not meant for you."
The vast majority of advertising isn't for any specific individual. I've no interest in perfumes, fashion, electric cars or jewellery that feature on boards nearby and I've no idea who the celebrity endorsers are, but why should I care?
But many modern people have a compulsion that they need to be involved in everything, all the time, and anything they don't understand is either mocked or protested. It's a form of entitled self-importance, but what's the cause?
Hmm, I think you're projecting something different onto me.
When I was typing my post I thought about billboards for divorce attorneys: I am happily married so those billboards aren't for me, but this fact alone wasn't enough to alter the idea behind my post. And I guess I should also note that I did not demand that all billboards cater exclusively to my interests, that is obviously unworkable nonsense.
So let me try to refine:
Public advertising is...public. "of or concerning the people as a whole"; "exposed to general view", to pick two dictionary definitions. Billboards and stadiums occupy public spaces, places you walk or drive by all the time, so one could reasonably intuit that they should be representative of the people who inhabit those spaces.
Analogies don't usually help, but let me try: If a city had 90% of its inhabitants speaking German, you would expect most of the signage and advertising to be in German. An Italian speaker would arrive in the city and just feel that the place was...different, not for them. (It would not be "entitled self-importance" to say so.)
If a city was 90% German speakers, 10% French speakers, and the signage and advertising was all in French - what would the visiting Italian speaker make of that? Would a group of Germans in town rightly be accused of "entitled self-importance" for asking that the world around them is accessible?
Same with Barcelona FC's stadium. Originally called "Estadi del Barcelona", a new nickname became popular enough that the members voted to rename it to "Camp Nou". That makes sense to me, the ones who are there and members, get to decide the name. Cue 2022: Spotify (Swedish/American company?) buys the rights to the name, so now it is supposedly "Spotify Camp Nou" which is used absolutely everywhere on marketing materials, buildings and clothing, yet no one actually calls it that nor does Spotify have much to do with Barcelona or the club.
I think it's alienating because people were told all their lives that their commercial impact is actual power, that they can "vote with their wallet". That has never been true, but now they're not even lying to us anymore.
Regular people have no relevant political power and no relevant economic power, and the people in power have stopped pretending that we do.
The world is not for us, we don't even matter enough to have billboards advertising to us anymore.
A small town vote can with their wallet on their local diner, at least. The sentiment certainly has significant limitations, though lots of votes with wallets should still matter, just as inversely one writein for Buckethead wouldn’t suddenly make him prime minister.
for me it's the opposite of alienating - it's like the ads have been banished to some niche sphere and I can live my regular life in the city unbothered by advertising.
I feel like SF has been full of frequently inscrutable billboards as long as I’ve been coming here — at least a decade.
It’s maybe got slightly more extreme recently, with an even larger percentage of them being inscrutable to me as someone who both works in tech and has a decent grasp of current industry trends.
I’ve never really got it — if even I don’t know what you’re advertising (or often, who is advertising!), how does this help your sales?
Keep in mind that marketing is not just trying to teach you about someone you're unaware of, but is also in part about assuring you (and your boss) that you're about to make the right choice when their sales team is already talking to you, and even in part about ensuring that you (and your boss) continue to feel confident that you did make the right choice (or alternatively make you have doubts about having picked the competitor) after you made the buy.
Making their sales peoples job easier, in particular, can be a lot cheaper than getting the marketing on its own to sell someone on you. They want you to go "oh, yes, FooBar Inc, I recognise that name" instead of your reaction being "who?!?".
A lot of marketing without calls to action fall in the latter two categories. In that case they don't need to tell you who they are. They just need you to notice that they're there enough that they seem like a player that is a good choice. You don't even necessarily want to come across as caring too much about explaining who you are - you just want to portray the silent confidence of someone buyers should already know.
(I have no idea whether the specific billboards you're talking about succeed at this)
In the SF tech scene they talk about this -- startups say they will put up a billboard for one CTO.
I don't even think that's an exaggeration. I watched a YouTube video about a startup that wanted to land a major client, figured out the CTO's commute, and put up billboards along the way.
Then they called the guy and he told them "I see your ads everywhere." They had an in.
The economics likely make sense when a contract is easily worth tens of millions of dollars. They're trying to create the perception that they're established in the mind of one person.
I sort of look at it as putting a flag on the moon. Billboards are how tech companies claim ownership of SF and the tech sphere, any consumer influence is incidental.
I remember seeing an advertising exec talk about spending more money in the area the execs lived so they felt the impact of the advertising, regardless of how effective the spend actually was. This is likely more of the same - making the investors and C-Suite get warm fuzzies.
If you drive through Las Vegas, all the billboards are about casinos. If you drive through farm country, all the billboards are about the local cash crop.
Advertisers target the people likely to see the ad and spend money on the topic. Billboards are extremely geographically restricted, so local interest dominates. This isn't really news.
The issue is that in most cities, most people are involved in the major industry or know people who are. Casino dealers, farm workers, etc.
But there aren't very many blue collar tech jobs beyond security and the cafeterias. It undoubtedly feels like an invasive species for much of the lower middle class, who's been here longer than the tech workers.
> If you drive through farm country, all the billboards are about the local cash crop.
Have you ever driven through farm country? I do fairly regularly (on an interstate). There's like one billboard for a (cattle) vet on my route. Most ads are for restaurants, healthcare, and the regular stuff.
It's more of a tragedy of the commons. There are so many AI billboards in SF that I legitimately can't differentiate any of the AI startups anymore, and that's even if they say what their product actually is.
I saw the band Chat Pile a while back in Los Angeles. They played the previous night in San Francisco — their singer mentioned the billboards and led the crowd in an ethusiastic chant of "F*k AI!".
SF is always on the brink of death from one thing or another. Has to be the most melodramatic populace in America. I’ve lived here for 13 years, my wife for 20. It’s the same as always.
We saw a Sees Candies : No AI needed billboard yesterday. Thought that was funny.
Haha. That’s funny. I tell my friends that perhaps instead of ruining my daughter’s name (Astra) as a GPT model name they could have picked ChatJupiter since it sounds like GPT. No one has laughed yet but maybe if I keep trying they will.
There’s another one out there that goes AI Dread? Call 1-800-HELP-MEE or something like that. Pity I was driving. Would have liked to have seen what that was.
> That average individual is Tucker James Bryant, a San Francisco conceptual artist who used to work as a marketing manager at Google and now works as keynote speaker.
Hard agree. Once you drive on a highway with no billboards (e.g. outside Seattle on I-5) you realize how much mental space they take up when you go back.
It doesn't sound like it used to be any better. Maybe we don't need to complain about AI destroying things that already sucked, like billboards or Linkedin.
While you can generally restrict new ones, you can't eliminate existing ones without basically paying out the lost revenue+etc to whoever is running it.
There's been a moratorium on new billboards in SF for a long time already. No new ones are getting built. Given the reliable revenue they provide, will be a long time before they naturally go extinct.
You can actually just eliminate existing ones. The government can just do things and absolutely already does whenever politicians really want something to happen (data centers, etc.). There's no law of nature that billboards must be allowed to remain where they are.
It would still get tied up in litigation. The “takings” doctrine that requires compensation is based on the fifth amendment: “ nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
I believe regulatory changes similar to what you propose have been ruled takings in the past. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the state would lose, but this supreme court doesn’t seem particularly amenable.
Hard for me to get too upset about billboards in an urban environment, let alone if they're promoting sugar water or some dumb AI service. Let them waste their money.
They’re tacky, but I appreciate how clearly it homogenizes what is being pitched globally as some unique thing that only a few big companies do, or that it’s magic. Like the other thread on Vegas casino adverts… It’s big, it’s annoying, and if they’re going to survive (casinos get demolished/sold/bankrupted), lasting differentiation requires more than just sparkly lights, an AI feature, and a VC-subsidized advertising budget.
In the 90s I remember billboards on US-101 for VHDL something or the other. At least people have heard of AI. But yes, these low-effort and occasionally creepy billboards are nowhere near as entertaining as the old Lombardi Sports ads ("The Great Outdoors. Connecting us to our heritage. Like the Donner Party").
Off-topic, but am curious about why this page doesn't allow scrolling using either a mouse or touchpad unless you're "grabbing" the scrollbar. (At least you can page up and page down with keys, I should add.) Am using a Blink-based browser on macOS, if that matters.
I remember when I was young and every billboard in SF was some stupid web 2.0 startup, or SaaS, or Crypto Shitcoins. Now we're plagued with AI billboards and the world is ending!
At least I could usually tell what a web 2.0 company actually did. With AI nearly being a commodity at this point, AI billboards are like seeing ads for different brands of table salt.
Yawn. I was just in Tampa where I saw several billboards for “permanent male enhancement”.*. I don’t drink or smoke, so liquor ane cigarette ads just slide into my blind spot (a neural network ad blocker).
My favorite billboard was in Silicon Valley, not SF, back in the early 90s when people around here still cared about technology: “high speed analog simulation.” If you needed that, the billboard was for you! Nobody complained. The same year I decided my company would show job ads before the movies at century 16 (next to where Google now is). The lady who took the ss ws dubious, but our first (“can you program in C++? Looking for a job? Write to jobs@cygnus.com). It made the NYT, but then became commonplace and now nobody looks for jobs that way. Sic transit gloria mundi
* I assume this is a service that teaches them empathy and how to listen.
Oh it's the AI billboards, and not the crowds of like 20 people shooting up at 7am as I'm walking from my hotel to Moscone for my work conference? I guess the AI billboards do create a bitterly ironic feeling in that context, but my overall impression of SF is that it's the lowest trust society I've ever been to, in or out of this country. Basic lawlessness is so common that even things like my hotel's elevator inspection was 3 years out of date when I last visited. Part of that is that I end up having to walk around the Tenderloin/SoMA/Union Square parts of town if I'm there for something at Moscone, but honestly that's on SF. Keep the downtown part of your city that people visit clean enough that my clothes don't reek at the end of the day just from the smell of the city. I honestly never have this issue in NYC.
"Killing SF" is overly dramatic, and others have noted that the phenomenon observed here is not unique to AI, or SF.
But there is something a little...alienating about advertising that's not meant for you.
It's a dumb example, but in Pittsburgh the football stadium was renamed from Heinz Field to Acrisure Stadium.
Of course, "Three Rivers Stadium", the name of the previous building, was best. It's not a name that tries to sell you something. But if you must sell something, "Heinz" is extremely good: it sells products for everyone, and it has historical roots in the area. Of the people, for the people.
But Acrisure? I've looked it up a few times and I still can't remember exactly what it is. Business services or insurance or something like that. And I'm sure that both Acrisure and the Steelers don't really care that I don't know what it is, because it's not really for the vast majority of the 65,000 people who show up on a Sunday to cheer for the team.
That's...weird.
I think it's related to the K shaped economy. The country is no longer being built for the middle class, which is concerning.
I think you're on to something. It's really concerning that the people with the money to run these ad campaigns are so removed from the bulk of the populace that they don't even bother targeting them with all the billboards anymore, just each other.
Otoh maybe I'm looking at it wrong, and maybe billboard advertising has gotten so ineffective that it's cheapened to the point that you can tuck it into your campaign as an afterthought. If you get one solid enterprise lead from it, it pays for the whole year. And besides it has branding value.
Either way, definitely feels a bit dystopian to me. How alienating must it feel for the service worker commuting to his dead end job where even the billboards don't make sense anymore?
"But there is something a little...alienating about advertising that's not meant for you."
The vast majority of advertising isn't for any specific individual. I've no interest in perfumes, fashion, electric cars or jewellery that feature on boards nearby and I've no idea who the celebrity endorsers are, but why should I care?
But many modern people have a compulsion that they need to be involved in everything, all the time, and anything they don't understand is either mocked or protested. It's a form of entitled self-importance, but what's the cause?
Hmm, I think you're projecting something different onto me.
When I was typing my post I thought about billboards for divorce attorneys: I am happily married so those billboards aren't for me, but this fact alone wasn't enough to alter the idea behind my post. And I guess I should also note that I did not demand that all billboards cater exclusively to my interests, that is obviously unworkable nonsense.
So let me try to refine:
Public advertising is...public. "of or concerning the people as a whole"; "exposed to general view", to pick two dictionary definitions. Billboards and stadiums occupy public spaces, places you walk or drive by all the time, so one could reasonably intuit that they should be representative of the people who inhabit those spaces.
Analogies don't usually help, but let me try: If a city had 90% of its inhabitants speaking German, you would expect most of the signage and advertising to be in German. An Italian speaker would arrive in the city and just feel that the place was...different, not for them. (It would not be "entitled self-importance" to say so.)
If a city was 90% German speakers, 10% French speakers, and the signage and advertising was all in French - what would the visiting Italian speaker make of that? Would a group of Germans in town rightly be accused of "entitled self-importance" for asking that the world around them is accessible?
Same with Barcelona FC's stadium. Originally called "Estadi del Barcelona", a new nickname became popular enough that the members voted to rename it to "Camp Nou". That makes sense to me, the ones who are there and members, get to decide the name. Cue 2022: Spotify (Swedish/American company?) buys the rights to the name, so now it is supposedly "Spotify Camp Nou" which is used absolutely everywhere on marketing materials, buildings and clothing, yet no one actually calls it that nor does Spotify have much to do with Barcelona or the club.
I think it's alienating because people were told all their lives that their commercial impact is actual power, that they can "vote with their wallet". That has never been true, but now they're not even lying to us anymore.
Regular people have no relevant political power and no relevant economic power, and the people in power have stopped pretending that we do.
The world is not for us, we don't even matter enough to have billboards advertising to us anymore.
A small town vote can with their wallet on their local diner, at least. The sentiment certainly has significant limitations, though lots of votes with wallets should still matter, just as inversely one writein for Buckethead wouldn’t suddenly make him prime minister.
for me it's the opposite of alienating - it's like the ads have been banished to some niche sphere and I can live my regular life in the city unbothered by advertising.
Heinz just sells diabetes & fatty liver disease and packages it as a staple of american cuisine.
What did the prepared mustard ever do to you?
You're far, far more likely to get fatty liver disease from products sold by companies like Diageo and Bacardi.
I feel like SF has been full of frequently inscrutable billboards as long as I’ve been coming here — at least a decade.
It’s maybe got slightly more extreme recently, with an even larger percentage of them being inscrutable to me as someone who both works in tech and has a decent grasp of current industry trends.
I’ve never really got it — if even I don’t know what you’re advertising (or often, who is advertising!), how does this help your sales?
Keep in mind that marketing is not just trying to teach you about someone you're unaware of, but is also in part about assuring you (and your boss) that you're about to make the right choice when their sales team is already talking to you, and even in part about ensuring that you (and your boss) continue to feel confident that you did make the right choice (or alternatively make you have doubts about having picked the competitor) after you made the buy.
Making their sales peoples job easier, in particular, can be a lot cheaper than getting the marketing on its own to sell someone on you. They want you to go "oh, yes, FooBar Inc, I recognise that name" instead of your reaction being "who?!?".
A lot of marketing without calls to action fall in the latter two categories. In that case they don't need to tell you who they are. They just need you to notice that they're there enough that they seem like a player that is a good choice. You don't even necessarily want to come across as caring too much about explaining who you are - you just want to portray the silent confidence of someone buyers should already know.
(I have no idea whether the specific billboards you're talking about succeed at this)
In the SF tech scene they talk about this -- startups say they will put up a billboard for one CTO.
I don't even think that's an exaggeration. I watched a YouTube video about a startup that wanted to land a major client, figured out the CTO's commute, and put up billboards along the way.
Then they called the guy and he told them "I see your ads everywhere." They had an in.
The economics likely make sense when a contract is easily worth tens of millions of dollars. They're trying to create the perception that they're established in the mind of one person.
I sort of look at it as putting a flag on the moon. Billboards are how tech companies claim ownership of SF and the tech sphere, any consumer influence is incidental.
I remember seeing an advertising exec talk about spending more money in the area the execs lived so they felt the impact of the advertising, regardless of how effective the spend actually was. This is likely more of the same - making the investors and C-Suite get warm fuzzies.
More ego than practical.
If you drive through Las Vegas, all the billboards are about casinos. If you drive through farm country, all the billboards are about the local cash crop.
Advertisers target the people likely to see the ad and spend money on the topic. Billboards are extremely geographically restricted, so local interest dominates. This isn't really news.
And yes, they are annoying.
The most fun one is the Metro stations near the Pentagon, where often the ads will be for fighter jet engine upgrades.
They must work, because they're buying the ad space for about three relevant people.
The issue is that in most cities, most people are involved in the major industry or know people who are. Casino dealers, farm workers, etc.
But there aren't very many blue collar tech jobs beyond security and the cafeterias. It undoubtedly feels like an invasive species for much of the lower middle class, who's been here longer than the tech workers.
> If you drive through farm country, all the billboards are about the local cash crop.
Have you ever driven through farm country? I do fairly regularly (on an interstate). There's like one billboard for a (cattle) vet on my route. Most ads are for restaurants, healthcare, and the regular stuff.
All the time. The billboards are very often about fertilizer, tractors, and shipping.
And if that is the argument, there are plenty of local business billboards in the Bay Area as well.
> And if that is the argument, there are plenty of local business billboards in the Bay Area as well.
I don't have an argument, it's just what you describe doesn't match my experience.
It's more of a tragedy of the commons. There are so many AI billboards in SF that I legitimately can't differentiate any of the AI startups anymore, and that's even if they say what their product actually is.
Bold of you to assume they actually have products ;)
I saw the band Chat Pile a while back in Los Angeles. They played the previous night in San Francisco — their singer mentioned the billboards and led the crowd in an ethusiastic chant of "F*k AI!".
I didn’t ever expect to see Chat Pile mentioned here. Their music captures this sentiment perfectly though.
Great performers, great band
Far better than the band 999mb, they don't do well in the gig economy.
[dead]
SF is always on the brink of death from one thing or another. Has to be the most melodramatic populace in America. I’ve lived here for 13 years, my wife for 20. It’s the same as always.
We saw a Sees Candies : No AI needed billboard yesterday. Thought that was funny.
You might like this prank billboard that’s up: https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/prank-san-francisc...
Haha. That’s funny. I tell my friends that perhaps instead of ruining my daughter’s name (Astra) as a GPT model name they could have picked ChatJupiter since it sounds like GPT. No one has laughed yet but maybe if I keep trying they will.
There’s another one out there that goes AI Dread? Call 1-800-HELP-MEE or something like that. Pity I was driving. Would have liked to have seen what that was.
> That average individual is Tucker James Bryant, a San Francisco conceptual artist who used to work as a marketing manager at Google and now works as keynote speaker.
This is some low quality bait.
I think we should ban all billboards. We deserve as a species to have spaces where we are not being advertised to.
The 280 freeway on the Peninsula in the Bay Area has banned billboards, and it is quite a pleasant drive.
Hard agree. Once you drive on a highway with no billboards (e.g. outside Seattle on I-5) you realize how much mental space they take up when you go back.
Muir Woods is right there.
Right, we could put ads there too. Who's working on this?
I haven't live there since 2020, but before that it was all various SaaS and data pipeline related billboards.
It doesn't sound like it used to be any better. Maybe we don't need to complain about AI destroying things that already sucked, like billboards or Linkedin.
And at the turn of the century it was all about dot coms.
Ads are influencing us to buy things we don't need! This is terrible!
[Billboards stop targeting you at all.]
Ads no longer influence us to buy things we don't need! This is terrible!
Just take the win.
Yes. Billboards that condition you to stop looking at them sound awesome.
Advertising should be banned. It's an attack on the mind.
You can't in california, actually.
While you can generally restrict new ones, you can't eliminate existing ones without basically paying out the lost revenue+etc to whoever is running it.
Ban new ones and that will naturally go extinct
There's been a moratorium on new billboards in SF for a long time already. No new ones are getting built. Given the reliable revenue they provide, will be a long time before they naturally go extinct.
You can actually just eliminate existing ones. The government can just do things and absolutely already does whenever politicians really want something to happen (data centers, etc.). There's no law of nature that billboards must be allowed to remain where they are.
What if we got a proposition that said we have to take them all down and not pay for lost revenue?
It would still get tied up in litigation. The “takings” doctrine that requires compensation is based on the fifth amendment: “ nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
I believe regulatory changes similar to what you propose have been ruled takings in the past. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the state would lose, but this supreme court doesn’t seem particularly amenable.
Hard for me to get too upset about billboards in an urban environment, let alone if they're promoting sugar water or some dumb AI service. Let them waste their money.
They’re tacky, but I appreciate how clearly it homogenizes what is being pitched globally as some unique thing that only a few big companies do, or that it’s magic. Like the other thread on Vegas casino adverts… It’s big, it’s annoying, and if they’re going to survive (casinos get demolished/sold/bankrupted), lasting differentiation requires more than just sparkly lights, an AI feature, and a VC-subsidized advertising budget.
In the 90s I remember billboards on US-101 for VHDL something or the other. At least people have heard of AI. But yes, these low-effort and occasionally creepy billboards are nowhere near as entertaining as the old Lombardi Sports ads ("The Great Outdoors. Connecting us to our heritage. Like the Donner Party").
Off-topic, but am curious about why this page doesn't allow scrolling using either a mouse or touchpad unless you're "grabbing" the scrollbar. (At least you can page up and page down with keys, I should add.) Am using a Blink-based browser on macOS, if that matters.
I remember when I was young and every billboard in SF was some stupid web 2.0 startup, or SaaS, or Crypto Shitcoins. Now we're plagued with AI billboards and the world is ending!
At least I could usually tell what a web 2.0 company actually did. With AI nearly being a commodity at this point, AI billboards are like seeing ads for different brands of table salt.
There were cryptic billboards in the last 2 tech booms too (dotcom, web 2.0) - the one that comes to mind is the Google ones that were a puzzle that led to a recruiting funnel (2004: https://www.npr.org/2004/09/14/3916173/google-entices-job-se...)
There are a lot of Monaco billboards up now which made me laugh.
Yawn. I was just in Tampa where I saw several billboards for “permanent male enhancement”.*. I don’t drink or smoke, so liquor ane cigarette ads just slide into my blind spot (a neural network ad blocker).
My favorite billboard was in Silicon Valley, not SF, back in the early 90s when people around here still cared about technology: “high speed analog simulation.” If you needed that, the billboard was for you! Nobody complained. The same year I decided my company would show job ads before the movies at century 16 (next to where Google now is). The lady who took the ss ws dubious, but our first (“can you program in C++? Looking for a job? Write to jobs@cygnus.com). It made the NYT, but then became commonplace and now nobody looks for jobs that way. Sic transit gloria mundi
* I assume this is a service that teaches them empathy and how to listen.
Oh it's the AI billboards, and not the crowds of like 20 people shooting up at 7am as I'm walking from my hotel to Moscone for my work conference? I guess the AI billboards do create a bitterly ironic feeling in that context, but my overall impression of SF is that it's the lowest trust society I've ever been to, in or out of this country. Basic lawlessness is so common that even things like my hotel's elevator inspection was 3 years out of date when I last visited. Part of that is that I end up having to walk around the Tenderloin/SoMA/Union Square parts of town if I'm there for something at Moscone, but honestly that's on SF. Keep the downtown part of your city that people visit clean enough that my clothes don't reek at the end of the day just from the smell of the city. I honestly never have this issue in NYC.
Try this:
Do the exact opposite of what the majority of the "AI billboards" are saying.
Job done.
I absolutely love tech related billboards in SF Bay Area, nothing screams Silicon Valley more than those.