Airbnb's ads make them fools in national news | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb's ads make them fools in national news

sfexaminer.com

53 pointsedward17 comments

What were they even trying to accomplish? I can't even figure out a way to look at these ads that could explain how they would possibly result in any positive result for AirBnB.

They focused on themselves (what the city could do with their money) rather than the people voting and what mattered to the voters. Really terrible ad fail. Worst this year.

Jesus christ, what a bunch of self-absorbed assholes at the top vetting something like this.

Does anyone have a guess as to how they hoped people would read this?

Surely they imagined it communicating something other than "we're mad we had to pay our taxes".

I guess it was just supposed to tap into general anti-tax (or anti-government) sentiment. I think you were supposed to read it as, "these tax dollars aren't going to benefit you directly" or "the government is going to waste the windfall from this tax so they don't deserve it."

Hard to say for sure. It's a pretty terrible ad on many levels. Even if I were sympathetic to the message, it seems like it would be a bad idea to remind me about the tax-funded things I enjoy when I'm deciding on a tax.

I would not say fools.

This is actually great for them they didn't actually do anything bad(like dumping oil or stuff like that), so people wont care in a month or so and the news media gives them a toon of publicity.

AKA all publicity is good publicity.

It probably cost them prop F though.

Yep. This was astonishingly dumb. As an acquaintance (I live in San Francisco) said, "Any time a corporation dumps that much money into a local issue, I'm voting against them." I think a lot of people are coming to that viewpoint now.

Which, whatever one thinks of AirBnB, not terribly great. The proposition, ISTM, has problems that are likely to have unpleasant repercussions mostly unrelated to the company/service/local housing issues.

> "Any time a corporation dumps that much money into a local issue, I'm voting against them." I think a lot of people are coming to that viewpoint now.

If a critical mass of people come to this point of view, that will be the end of corporate lobbying on these type of issues. However, most issues have different corporations dumping money on each side of the issue which makes that theory hard to follow.

Also, I really don't have a problem with companies dumping money into an issue that they feel is a threat to their future existence. If they didn't try to persuade people on the issue, they would be doing a disservice to their employees and investors.

I wasn't asserting a value judgement on the viewpoint, only noting the seeming popularity of it.

Yes, narrowly construed, corporate officers have obligations that look a something like that. I look at it as an activity that takes place in the broader world of policy making. Personally, I think to judge the cost or benefit of corporate lobbying as a driver of policy requires substantially more investigation than simply whether or not they are properly representing their stakeholders.

"For all lawful purposes" covers a range of behaviours that many folks have a problem with, those employees and investors also have voices, votes and the ability to spend money whether or not the corporation does, the supposed alignment of interested between corporate officers, investors and employees really isn't there in many cases of corporate lobbying (unions exist for a reason, for instance, and so to shareholder lawsuits), game theoretic concerns about what it does to democracy, and on and on.

None of which really matters to the analysis that AirBnB really comes off like a nest of entitled jackasses with this ad and turned off a lot of people who may well have been otherwise sympathetic to the notion that this proposition has some really bad provisions. If I were a stakeholder, I'd likely be thinking that the officers did me a disservice by spending a ton of money to convince lots of people vote against my hypothetical interests.

AKA all publicity is good publicity.

Unfortunately for Airbnb this isn't true. What they don't get is that when publicity becomes negative enough, it actually does, in fact, work against you.

Especially when you have a concrete goal like winning a ballot initiative instead of just "raising brand awareness"

AKA all publicity is good publicity.

Although I am very fond of that saying, it is not actually literally true. It is useful to keep it in mind as a rule of thumb that controversy per se is not necessarily bad and to be somewhat thick skinned about what happens when you are in the public eye, as it won't be all warm fuzzies and fanfare. But you absolutely can be hurt from the wrong kinds of publicity.

The "all publicity is good publicity" rule only applies when you have no visibility. When you're an international business with a twenty-five-billion-dollar valuation, there emphatically is such a thing as bad publicity.

Have we verified that it was actually AirBnb who posted these ads? There's information floating around which indicates that the ad creators were actually an anti-AirBnb party and were well aware of how offensive and tone deaf the advertisements were/are. [1]

However, it's hard to tell if that's just AirBnb covering itself in light of the negative public reception.

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100700506082939&se...

EDIT: after poking around a bit more, looks like it is AirBnb. There are a few quotes about the advertisements from a spokesperson here: http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-takes-down-san-francis...

The fact that so many people thought is was a hoax is an amazing illustration of how terrible these ads were.

> “What a colossal mistake,” Ross said. “I think it’s one of those things that reinforces everything bad about the tech industry, and about Airbnb, that people feel.”

And when tech people respond by thinking this must be an anti-tech conspiracy, they're further reinforcing the feeling.

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