Announcements Humantic AI

The Story Behind The Provocative Plane Banner at Dreamforce 2024

Let’s set the scene: it’s Dreamforce 2024. The world’s largest sales conference hosted by Salesforce which now identifies as the world’s largest AI conference. In fact, it’s been 2 years since the rebrand and Salesforce only seems to be doubling down on the new positioning with its latest push of Agentic AI.

One can not overstate how critical AI is and how it factors in the way the sales tech landscape is unfolding today. In typical Humantic style, we wanted to shake and wake people. So shake and wake we did.

How?

The One Thing Every Dreamforce Attendee Found Hard To Miss, And Harder To Ignore

15,000 feet above the ground, a plane carrying a strange message made 200,000 salespeople look up in awe and a little bit of confusion

See it in its full glory here.

SALESPEOPLE = PESTS

While you’re at it, see the people’s reactions to this spectacle.

Who could possibly be behind this message?

In SFGate’s original piece reporting this story and on Instagram, online commenters had various theories on who could be behind this bold marketing activation:

  • Siebel is “taking revenge” for what Salesforce / Marc Benioff did to them back in the day (alluding to Salesforce’s iconic ‘No Software’ campaign)
  • Salesforce is trolling the rest of the industry
  • SF Bay Area Locals are protesting the yearly influx of outsiders (predominantely salespeople) into the city during Dreamforce time
  • Some startup is trying to pull a Salesforce on Salesforce (this group finally got it right!)

So we’ll own up to it. We did it. Us, Humantic AI.

In fact, we revealed more of the message on days 2 and 3 of Dreamforce. Along with it, we revealed ourselves too.

And there’s a reason why we didn’t put our name alongside the message on the first day. We could have used the publicity if we were paying for it, right?

But instead, we wanted our audience (salespeople) to listen and reflect. This is an usual thing salespeople often hear – that we’re annoying, a nuisance, a pest, and whatnot. But to go to an event filled with salespeople and remind them that there’s no hiding from this new reputation sellers are building… that was our intention.

We will let our banners on day 2 and day 3 tell the rest of the story.

Day 2: SALESPEOPLE = PESTS? BUYERS SAY YES. BUT...
Day 2: SALESPEOPLE = PESTS? BUYERS SAY YES. BUT…
Day 3: SALESPEOPLE = PESTS? BUYERS SAY YES. UNLESS YOU GO #BUYERFIRST. HUMANTIC AI – GOBUYERFIRST.ORG

So that’s the whole story. If you weren’t at Dreamforce, now is a good time to visit gobuyerfirst.org and adapt this story into a blockbuster movie where you emerge the hero.

Beyond the skies

We didn’t just paint the sky yellow, we painted the whole town yellow (and some shades of blue).

Humantic AI took over San Francisco with real quotes from buyers on how they perceive sellers. We hope this food for thought will bring you back to humantic.ai some day when you’re ready to join the buyer-first movement.

It is worth noting that these are all based on reality. Nothing is made up. In fact, some of the real quotes were deemed unprintable by our billboard vendor. That’s the kind of language people use to speak about sellers. Isn’t it time we changed that?

Humantic AI reinvents human interaction by enabling its users to reliably understand other people's personality and behavior without requiring them to take any test. Using Humantic AI's cutting-edge personality AI, salespeople can consistently close more deals.