If you had to ask whose forehead was plastered on a billboard along San Francisco’s Route 101 last month, you were clearly not in the start-up world.
The large ad, declaring “Target Marc on TV,” was among a smattering of head-scratching billboards by Vibe, a New York-based advertising technology start-up, that put the insider culture of tech on full display.
The forehead alluded to one of the tech industry’s most well-known investors, Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Another nearby wallscape showed just a leather-clad shoulder, a nod to Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, who is known for his fondness for black motorcycle jackets. A billboard for Elon Musk, the Tesla mogul who also owns the social media network X, pictured a kitchen sink — a nod to a viral video of Mr. Musk carrying a sink into Twitter’s office in 2022 with the caption “let that sink in.”
Vibe’s campaign, which ran through January, was playing a tech industry insider game: targeting a tiny audience of tech investors and influencers who would get the joke and — just maybe — try to find who was behind those billboards. And while other ad campaigns have forced Bay Area residents to decode tech lingo, Vibe’s billboards took obscurity to a new level of microtargeting.
“These are people that everyone in the Valley wants to talk to,” said Arthur Querou, chief executive of Vibe, which creates targeting and analytics software for companies to run advertisements on streaming services.
Mr. Querou said one of Vibe’s products offered an advertising algorithm to place streaming ads in front of specific people, like executives in a particular region. That’s why, he said, the recent billboards nod to Silicon Valley celebrities who clients may want to “target” on TV.
“It’s very recognizable,” Mr. Querou said of the ad campaign. “Of course, a lot of people in S.F. will not understand the joke, but the people we want to talk to do get the joke.”
There are billions being invested in San Francisco’s start-up scene right now, and a lot of that money will go toward marketing. Mr. Querou hopes his analog ads will lead start-ups to put some of that cash toward streaming ads with his firm.
Advertising on a San Francisco billboard or wallscape can cost anywhere from $15,000 for a downtown ad to the low six figures for prime signage along Route 101 for about six weeks, said Christopher Tavlarides, president of Capitol Outdoor, which owns about 30 billboards across the Bay Area.
Mr. Tavlarides said the demand for ad space had increased over the past year, especially for billboards near certain tech offices or venture capital firms.
But for those who aren’t in on the joke, the deluge of tech ads have become white noise.
“To be honest, it’s too vague for me, and I feel that’s the point,” said James Markert, looking up at a brick wall that said “Target Tim on TV” next to a bitten red apple. The “Tim” in question was Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple.
Mr. Markert, a bartender in the city’s Jackson Square neighborhood, said he had no idea what “Tim” this ad was targeting.
While Vibe’s billboards have gone viral online, Mr. Querou said he was “a bit sad” to not have heard from the tech executives they called out yet. Representatives for Apple, Nvidia and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Still, Mr. Querou received plenty of texts from friends he went to college with at the University of California, Berkeley. Some of them now work in San Francisco as engineers at big tech companies, not start-ups, and sent him pictures of the billboards. But they still didn’t know whom the “Marc” ads were targeting, he said.
Danielle Jing, who works at a start-up down the block from the Jackson Square Apple ad, didn’t get the joke. She squinted up at the wallscape on her walk back to the office on a recent evening and said it must just be for “online tech people.”
But the forehead billboard along Route 101? She said she immediately knew that reference because she used to work in venture capital.
Mr. Andreessen, the owner of that viral forehead, did not respond to a request for comment.
Natallie Rocha is a San Francisco-based technology reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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