AI’s $300 Million Billboards: The Fight to Look Human

According to Inc, between October 2024 and October 2025, fewer than a dozen top AI companies spent more than $300 million on advertising in a race for attention. Salesforce committed nearly $77 million to marketing Agentforce, Microsoft spent at least $59 million on Copilot, and Google put nearly $17 million behind Gemini. Anthropic spent $14.8 million on Claude, while OpenAI spent nearly double that—$30 million—on ChatGPT. While most spending is digital, a visible chunk is going offline, with OpenAI alone spending $2.2 million on outdoor ads in October 2024, up from $870,000 in September. Companies are also staging real-world activations, like IBM at the U.S. Open and Google’s Sphere takeover in Las Vegas.

The Trust Playbook

Here’s the thing: this isn’t just about slapping a logo on a subway wall. The current wave of out-of-home (OOH) advertising feels like a conscious pivot away from the pure hype cycles of the past, especially the crypto boom of 2021-2022. Remember those ubiquitous Crypto.com ads? That was about mass exposure and a sense of inevitability. Today’s AI campaigns, at least from the bigger players, seem more focused on reassurance.

Look at Anthropic’s “Keep Thinking” campaign. Their billboards are deliberately calm, with earth tones and real people. The copy is sparse and philosophical: “Keep thinking,” “If there’s no solution, code one.” It’s a stark contrast to the high-energy, feature-blasting ads we’re used to. They’re trading technical bravado for mood. And they’re taking it a step further with physical “thinking spaces,” like their weeklong pop-up in a New York newsstand. No screens, no demos—just hand-drawn signs, film photography, and a poetry camera. It’s almost defiantly analog.

The Gamble of Going Physical

So why do this? For one, digital customer acquisition has gotten brutally expensive—costs are up as much as 60% in five years. But more importantly, there’s a strategic recalibration happening. As Gartner analyst Nicole Greene notes, nearly half of brand budgets at big companies are now for awareness, not immediate conversions. In a market flooded with similar-sounding AI products, long-term trust and differentiation are the new currencies.

But it’s a gamble. You can’t A/B test a billboard. And the reception isn’t always warm. Take the startup Friend. They spent over a million dollars to plaster the NYC subway with ads for their AI wearable, with promises like “I’ll never bail on our dinner plans.” The result? Many ads were quickly vandalized with critiques like “AI slop.” Even Heineken mocked them with a rival billboard. Founder Avi Schiffmann calls it “chaos is a ladder,” admitting he wanted a provocative reaction. He burned through 75% of his remaining funding on the campaign, betting it would “plant a flag.” That’s a wild risk for a startup.

Is Anyone Buying It?

The big question is, does this actually work? For Anthropic, their New York pop-up drew 5,000 people on opening weekend. People waited in long lines, which in London were entertained by Victorian carolers. One organizer noted that for many attendees, this was their “New York Fashion Week”—a novel, exclusive experience. That’s powerful. It creates a shared, tangible moment around a product that fundamentally exists in the cloud.

But let’s be real: the budgets tell the true story. Of Anthropic’s $20.5 million ad spend, only about $1 million was on outdoor ads. For Google’s Gemini, it was a mere $503,000 out of $27 million. The offline push is a fraction of the spend, but it’s a loud, intentional fraction. It’s a signal. In a world saturated with digital noise and AI-generated “slop,” the physical world becomes a place to humanize, to slow people down, and to try to earn a different kind of credibility. It’s not about explaining the tech. It’s about making you feel a certain way about it. Whether that feeling lasts is the real billion-dollar experiment.

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