Artisan, a San Francisco-based startup establishing the next generation of advanced digital workers, is fuelling this debate even further with its latest marketing campaign. The company’s billboards around the city boldly emphasise why businesses should replace human workers with Artisans.

Artisan’s CEO received death threats due to the campaign

Artisan’s first digital worker, Ava the BDR, was at the forefront of the company’s most recent marketing campaign. Beaming down on passersby, she is plastered alongside the statement “Stop Hiring Humans”. While this is the campaign’s core tagline, further billboards and phrases were also put out declaring "Artisans Won't Complain About Work-Life Balance" and “Artisans Won’t Come Into Work Hungover”.

The campaign generated an enormous growth in organic traffic, and social media posts about it have garnered millions of likes. Ironically, Artisan's biggest critics were helping the campaign go viral by engaging with the posts. While the billboards sparked outrage worldwide, Artisan’s goal was achieved: to provoke conversation. In a saturated market of AI automation, the company successfully made people think of Artisan when they thought of AI employees, even if it enraged them.

Online hate made it reach over one billion impressions

The campaign continued to go viral after Artisan doubled down on the controversy and posted an image from their sponsorship at TechCrunch’s booth on Reddit, captioning “Hired humans telling you to stop hiring humans.” The post quickly racked up 35,000 upvotes and millions of impressions. However, moderators eventually removed the post after learning Artisan was behind it. Despite this, Artisan’s marketing strategy paid off. Media outlets like CBS, Fox, SF Gate, TechCrunch, and Gizmodo took notice and covered the campaign.

Artisan was flooded with hate and sales meetings

However, not all the marketing tactics and coverage were well received, and Artisan’s inboxes were flooded with hate and death threats. But Artisan wasn’t trying to target the average worker at risk of losing their job to AI, they were targeting the big conglomerates who want to increase productivity and output.

This guerrilla marketing approach, combined with traditional media coverage and tactics, led to significant success. Artisan saw a remarkable +197% growth in brand search traffic, quickly establishing itself as the most well-known AI employee creator.

Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, founder of Artisan gives his view on the marketing campaign. He says: “The impact exceeded our wildest expectations. When I meet new people in San Francisco, 70% of the time they know about Artisan and what we do. Before, that number was around 5%. aHrefs ranked us #2 fastest growing AI companies by brand search. We’ve seen 1000s of sales meetings getting booked. October and November became our biggest months ever, bringing in over $2M in new ARR.

“The goal of the campaign was always to rage bait, but we never expected the level of backlash we ended up seeing. We don’t actually want people to stop hiring humans and I don’t actually think AI is dystopian. The real goal for us is to automate the work that humans don’t enjoy, and to make every job more human.”

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