San Francisco’s creative legacy and Silicon Valley’s tech prowess are more intertwined than ever – powering an ecosystem where marketing and innovation go hand in hand. But as the Bay Area grapples with economic inequality and a tarnished reputation, tech leaders and creatives are working to revive the city’s image – and its promise.
The early operators of Silicon Valley – a moniker the area earned for the silicon-based semiconductors that became its economic lifeblood – emerged in the 1950s with the likes of Fairchild Semiconductor and Shockley Semiconductors Laboratory. These organizations paved the path for the first generation of tech titans born in the Bay Area, which included Hewlett-Packard and Intel (founded by two early Fairchild Semiconductor employees). Soon enough, the grounds had been laid for what would eventually become the world’s most powerful tech ecosystem, which eventually shifted toward personal computing and digital innovation, with companies including Google, Meta and Apple coming to dominate the space.
As digital-era organizations flourished in the 2000s and early 2010s, San Francisco, long a haven for artists, creatives and countercultural movements, became an increasingly important part of the tech ecosystem. With its proximity to Silicon Valley’s engineering talent and its own heritage of creative experimentation, the city attracted a new breed of digital startups, from Uber and Square to Spotify, many of which were deeply embedded in the Bay Area’s cultural and economic fabric. Tech companies increasingly turned to advertising and media agencies to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded market, giving rise to a vibrant creative scene around branding, marketing, production and PR that complemented the tech industry’s focus on innovation.
Powered by AI
Explore frequently asked questions
This convergence of creativity and technology has accelerated in recent years as the tech industry has leaned more heavily on marketing and branding to humanize complex products and build customer trust. Companies such as Apple and Google have set the tone for how product-driven technology messages can be paired with compelling emotional narratives and striking visuals.
“A lot of the San Francisco marketing is some of the best product marketing in the world… Specifically, it’s Apple, it’s Google, it’s Airbnb,” Uber’s vice-president of global marketing David Mogensen tells The Drum. “They [set] the bar that my team is aspiring to hit.”
Marketing a brand – and marketing it well – has become a critical tactic for growth among the tech elite.
Revamping the city’s own brand
The Bay Area’s rapid economic growth, spurred in large part by the tech revolution, has not been without its downsides. The surge in wealth has widened income inequality and propelled housing prices to astronomical levels, exacerbating the region’s homelessness crisis and forcing many professionals out of the city – including many creatives. San Francisco has also been the subject of intense public policy debates and media derision over its lax drug policies and inadequate social and mental health services. These issues have not only sparked concerns about public health and economic inequality but have also diminished the diversity and vibrancy of the city.
As a knock-on effect, the city’s PR has suffered, too. A Gallup survey from July of 2023 revealed that only around half of Americans thought San Francisco was safe to live in or visit.
While San Francisco has made some efforts in recent years to improve social services, housing and financial aid for those in need, progress has been slow and the impact remains uneven.
Despite the slow crawl of progress on these critical issues, some are determined to revive the city’s image. In October of last year, a group of wealthy business leaders, including tech billionaire Chris Larsen and Bob Fisher of Gap, funded a $4m ad campaign aimed at revitalizing the city’s image.
Titled ‘It All Starts Here,’ the campaign aimed to remind visitors and locals of San Francisco’s pioneering spirit and cultural legacy. In a range of out-of-home placements, the ads nod to innovations born in the city. The copy on one ad reads: “The martini. The mai tai. And the Uber ride back home.” Despite the city’s ongoing challenges, the backers hoped the effort might rekindle civic pride and attract tourists and businesses.
At the time, Larsen told The New York Times: “No question we’ve got problems we’ve got to fix… But we can’t let the brand just suffer. We’ve got so much to be proud of and we can’t lose sight of that.”
The push for purpose
In spite of the city’s various economic and social quandaries, many believe that the creative spirit of the city is still alive and well – and it’s buoying the newest generation of tech heavyweights.
“It’s just such an eclectic area: you’ve got art, you’ve got tech, you’ve got finance,” says Instacart’s senior director of growth marketing strategy and operations Samantha Cousin.
Cousin’s own experience in the Bay Area’s flourishing tech startup scene has inspired her approach at Instacart, too. “I’ve personally worked at a ton of startups and what I love about the startup culture… is that you have people who are really passionate and excited to make a change. You definitely see that at Instacart – we try to be innovative in everything possible, whether that’s how we’re building products or how we’re going to market. You feel that [energy] within San Francisco, for sure… a kind of excitement to do something different.”
Cousin is tapping into a deeper truth about the Bay Area: the churn of innovation in this corner of the map remains deeply intertwined with lofty ideals about the kind of world we should aspire to create. It’s why OpenAI says its mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity” and that Block – the Jack Dorsey-run fintech venture that owns Square, Cash App and decentralized finance platform TBD – preaches a “purpose of economic empowerment.”
This eye toward higher, better realities frequently permeates every part of a business in the Bay Area – even trickling down through its marketing strategy.
“The almost ubiquitous liberal values in the Bay Area mean that many startups really are trying to ‘change the world.’ From healthcare to affordable housing, there is a consistent drumbeat of smart startups attempting to solve the most challenging problems in society,” says Jason Seeba, CMO at Session AI, a marketing AI firm. “In that same vein, marketers in the Bay Area tend to see technology as the answer to the world’s problems, so you see people – sometimes a little cluelessly – trying to tie simple tech to highly entrenched and complex problems. I know I did when it was me and six engineers in a garage trying to ‘solve healthcare quality.’”
It’s a notion echoed by Uber’s Mogensen. In the Bay Area’s tech scene, “there’s a strong ethos around making the world a better place in some capacity,” he says. “You see and feel that purpose when you look at the work that comes out of a lot of the companies in San Francisco.”
In his view, Uber “hasn’t probably done enough of that.” Many of the campaigns produced during his five-year tenure at Uber thus far have been “more functional, more tactical,” he explains, “like, ‘Hey, did you know we have trains in the UK?’ It’s not like, ‘Hey, this is what Uber… stands for,’” He contrasts this to the approach of some of the Bay’s behemoths. “If you say, ‘What is Google about?’ It’s [clear]; it’s about helpfulness.”
An ever-increasing focus on purpose is incentivizing more tech brands to trade performance and growth marketing for a bigger focus on top-of-funnel brand storytelling.
Take Airbnb, for example. Pre-Covid, Airbnb funneled a large portion of its spend into performance marketing. But as the pandemic upended the business, the marketing team found that its digital ads weren’t delivering meaningful results. So, in a bold move, the brand shifted almost all of its budget to the top of the funnel.
As the brand’s global CMO Hiroki Asai told The Drum in an interview last year, “Airbnb … was losing its uniqueness. It was losing its sense of brand and who it was. So, coming out of the pandemic, the decision was to really focus on the core business and to focus on creating experiences, creating features and creating a product … to differentiate ourselves – and then to use brand to actually communicate and teach people what those differences are.”
In short, “brand marketing is on the rise again,” says Lizz Niemeyer, head of marketing at Quilt, a Bay Area-based maker of smart home heating and cooling systems. “As growth strategies become less effective and customer attention becomes harder to capture, tech companies are recognizing the importance of building strong, lasting brands.”
And while brand-centric strategies often align with tech companies’ focus on purpose, as in Airbnb’s case, purpose can frequently go out the window in favor of growth. “The region’s ambition and the endless drive for returns can mean that adoption sometimes trumps social impact,” says Session AI’s Seeba. “You have tech workers whose incentives are all focused on growth, while society sometimes bears the costs.”
Need for speed
The industry’s obsession with speed, like its focus on growth, can sometimes be at odds with tech’s purpose-preaching. Few in the Valley have forgotten the story of Theranos and its Steve Jobs-obsessed founder, Elizabeth Holmes. The biotech startup, which sought to revolutionize blood testing, bypassed critical scientific validation processes and duped investors in its blind commitment to pushing its product to market quickly. Many of the company’s claims about its technology turned out to be fraudulent, ultimately landing Holmes in prison and leading to the dissolution of the company.
On the other hand, however, the tech sector’s philosophy of ‘move fast and break things’ – a motto said to have been coined by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg – is so baked into the culture of the Bay Area that it has inspired more agile approaches to marketing.
Suggested newsletters for you
Daily Briefing
Daily
Catch up on the most important stories of the day, curated by our editorial team.
Ads of the Week
Wednesday
See the best ads of the last week – all in one place.
The Drum Insider
Once a month
Learn how to pitch to our editors and get published on The Drum.
According to Zach Rubin, who leads business development at Bonfire Labs, a San Francisco-based creative studio: “Working with our tech clients has taught us that the speed at which they innovate and execute can inform our ability to craft flexible, quick-turn branding and campaigns. It mirrors a software development mentality, where iteration and adaptation replace long and drawn-out brand evolutions and often-missed swings at perfection. In short, the brand bible and traditional, long lead marketing timelines are dead – not just for nimble startups, but for all companies looking to adapt and grow.”
AI as the next evolution of tech-meets-creativity
Today, in the Bay, creativity and tech are growing even more closely intertwined with the explosion of AI. Beyond generative AI’s potential to upend creative development and execution with sophisticated visuals and impressive copywriting skills, automation is increasingly permeating the entire marketing funnel, delivering more advanced audience segmentation, targeting and measurement capabilities.
“The rise in AI is going to fundamentally change how marketers do their jobs and can be applied to a number of different marketing tasks, including market segmentation, campaign performance insights and creative ideation,” Salesforce CMO Ariel Kelman tells The Drum.
Despite ambient concerns about job displacement amid rapid AI development and deployment, many marketers have expressed confidence in their ability to work in tandem with the technology. “AI as a tool is going to amplify us and amplify our powers … [helping] us get rid of the mundane work that’s tedious and takes a long time and gets to the bigger picture,” Publicis Media’s senior vice-president of creative technology, Andrew Klein, said onstage at Advertising Week New York last week. “I definitely don’t think [there’s] going to be this drastic AI takeover.”
For now, the Bay Area remains a hub of both technological innovation and creative energy. As Bonfire Labs’ Rubin says: “The ethos of free thinking and rapid experimentation is the reason why the Bay is still the leader in the US tech landscape.”
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source link
