Silicon Valley goes for the BIG new thing in advertising: billboards!
It’s not the sort of advertising boom you might expect in one of the hottest spots for technology on earth. But, as Bloomberg reports, some of the most expensive property in Silicon Valley these days is about 14 feet high, 50 feet wide and overlooking the highway: Billboards!
The nerdy billboard star
And the stars are not always the glamorous types you might expect to find on billboards elsewhere: they can be techies. It's all part of the drive to attract talent.
Demand for a billboard along Highway 101 between San Francisco and San Jose, which billboard sellers refer to as the “gold coast,” is so high that some companies are on a six-month waiting list.
“I can’t get a board,” Shernaz Daver, says a consultant quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, who is trying to secure one for online education startup Udacity..
“I’ll have to book one for June 2015 until the end of the year and if I don’t book it in the next 48 hours, I’ll likely lose it.”
Bloomberg says the surging demand has led to “a jarring sight for those driving on the highway these days — a 50-foot picture of a pasty software engineer, lying provocatively on his side, showing a bit of chest hair and wearing only his underwear.
“Find the hottest tech talent,” reads the billboard for technology jobs website Dice.com which went up went up last month.
Outfront Media which owns about 40 billboards along the freeway, said sales in the area have more than doubled since 2011.with the firm on pace to take in more than $6 million from technology companies this year. Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc., another seller, is seeing similar growth, said spokesman David Grabert.
“We wanted to make people smile when they were stuck in traffic,” said Natasha Raja, vice president of marketing for Dice, whose parent company Dice Holdings Inc. is in New York. Raja led the development of the company’s Bay Area billboard campaign, which features the bare-chested coder in nerdy glasses and wearing a smartwatch.
“The people you see, they aren’t models, they’re real engineers,” she said.
The cost of renting billboards in the area ranges from $14,000 to $40,000 a month, depending on the size and location, said Scott Blair, chief growth officer for Billups Inc., a broker for renting billboard space based in Portland, Oregon.
The current billboard boom took off in 2011, said Matt Molina, head of sales for Outfront in the Bay Area.
Molina said the main reasons for advertising are practical. Along 101, there’s a captive audience stuck in traffic and promotions can help recruit employees and increase business.