Ads are people too

Braced against a hot, gritty wind, Herman Almarez is well into his fourth hour as a human sign for Brandon Fine Furniture. Sure, maybe he really wants to inspire in passersby thoughts of dinette sets and China hutches. But at the moment, Almarez seems more interested in using the ad as a shield against a particularly merciless gale. At least the people are more forgiving than the elements. On this Saturday afternoon, the suburban hordes rolling south in an SUV caravan take little notice of the man, who stands in the dirt among a small forest of billboards, trailer ads, posters and other signs.

"It's terrible, yeah. The hot weather. I stand here for a long time. The boredom," mutters Almarez, 37, in broken English. "This is just temporary, on weekends, while I look for a construction job." Meantime, he's spent the last two weekends pulling shifts here on Las Vegas Boulevard and Warm Springs Road, the gateway to the south valley's 'burbs. Brandon Furniture is in the third week of its experiment of hiring a company to station four people in the area to hold store signs. At $60 per six-hour shift, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than radio, and putting the signs in a person's hands sidesteps the myriad city and county laws governing traditional signage -- this way, it falls into the realm of free speech.

Commercial speech, that is. Almarez is a human sign. A living promotion. And believe him, between the heat, the hassles and the crushing monotony, it's not easy being an ad. "Aburrido! Aburrido!" Almarez says, nodding. Bored.

His boss, Pat Lee, ground sign manager for Don Grahm Mobile Billboard Advertising, pulls up in a minivan and hops out. Keeping the four "signwalkers" fed and watered is his priority on weekends, he explains.

"I try to take good care of these guys," says Lee. "A lot of this food is coming out of my pocket, man. I feed them lunch. For a while, I was feeding them breakfast, too, but I couldn't afford that shit. But you gotta give 'em water. It's not easy, man, in this direct sunlight, but I tell them to take breaks. If they don't feel good, sit the fuck down. 'Cause we don't want anyone hurting out here, not having enough water, food or whatever. So I take care of them the best I can. I've done all the shitty fucking jobs, I've been up on roofs, I've picked up fucking trash, so I know how it is, man, in 100-plus degree heat, doing the same fucking thing. It sucks."

Remember when ads were things on billboards, in magazines? Or even a flashing pop-up that hijacked your computer screen? Quaint days, those were.

Welcome to a new age of advertising, one in which yesteryear's man in a sandwich board has gotten a corporate makeover. It's the age of human signs -- and they're ready to break through your media-savvy consumer blinders with a single cheeky stunt. In recent years, several companies specializing in human signage have set down stakes in Las Vegas. Industry heavyweight Directional Concepts opened an office here more than 2 1/2 years ago, and employs an army of 450 "sign twirlers." Southern California's Aarrow Advertising came to town in November 2005; on any given weekend, more than 50 of its "sign spinners" perform on sidewalks and street corners.

In Las Vegas, the growing popularity of human signs stems from numerous factors: a jaded era in which the old methods -- like static billboards -- just don't command the attention they used to; a city where virtually no laws govern human signs; and a growth machine that continues to churn out new housing subdivisions -- many of which you've surely seen being hawked by teens doing elaborate stunts with cartoonishly large arrows. If these are the days when people, promotion and product so readily merge -- when an online casino sponsors a woman's pregnancy, when a Seattle entrepreneur "bumvertises" his website on beggars, when it's difficult to distinguish the movie from the marketing campaign from the video game -- then Vegas is a logical place for human ads to take root.

"We speak that language [of signs]," observes Steve Bottfeld, executive vice president of Marketing Solutions. The veteran marketing guru has seen countless sales shticks, but people as signs -- now that's a fit for Vegas. "We really understand that language a whole lot more readily than other cities' cultures. We understand what people do to surprise, amuse and attract attention to themselves, and we don't turn it off. In fact, I think we've come to expect it."

And perhaps in that very expectation lies another triumph of the salesman class. These days, we pay a cover charge for ad-free space. We subscribe to satellite radio, favor web browsers with pop-up blockers and e-mail programs with good spam filters; we depend on TiVo to rip those maddening Geico commercials from our favorite shows. It only makes sense that as we've found new ways to dodge commercial flack, the myrmidons of marketing should deploy advertising in a form difficult to ignore, dismiss or pay our way around: not billboards, not pop-ups, but people.

"It's an ad as entertainment," Michael Kenny, chief operating officer of Aarrow, says of sign-spinning. "In San Diego, we've been there four years, and it's ingrained in the culture there. There are news stories that say [sign] spinning is a new art form."

Pop-culture philosophizing aside, it's a fairly shitty job. A peek into the culture of human signage yields some surprising tales of workplace harassment -- a much wider field of play, considering that workplace isn't exactly bound by the fabric walls of a cubicle.

Take 15-year-old Richard Wheeler. The seven-month employee of Directional Concepts is standing in front of the Beazer sales trailer, where a flag sleepily advertises the developer's new Rosabella at Travato homesite. Feebly tilting his sign on Frontage Road in northwest Las Vegas on Sunday, Wheeler says he was robbed of his iPod a month ago -- a commodity almost as precious as water among human signs. It's a crucial tool for killing the boredom.

"I was sitting there, twirling my sign, whatever, then this guy came up on me and he was like, 'Give me your iPod.' And I said no, and he was like, 'You think I'm playing?' And I'm like, 'Yeah,' because you don't expect that. And like he kept on saying that, and I kept on answering the same way, like, five times. Finally he took a knife out on me and he's like, 'This is your last chance to give it to me or you know what's gonna happen.' I gave it to him and he took off running." Wheeler filed a police report, but still doesn't have his iPod back. Otherwise, the monotony is broken by the occasional honk, the occasional driver telling him to get a real job.

Not far up the street, also tilting signs for other Beazer developments are Tyreese Walker, 15, Derral Craig, 17, and Reshan Craig, 15. They're waiting for a certain white Jeep Cherokee to tear by again; the driver never fails to call them niggers. It's a dispiriting weekend occurrence that's as common as the roar of bulldozers. The heat packs a wallop -- "When it gets windy, that's the worst," says Walker -- but the racist bullshit burns more.

"There's a lot of racist people out here. Yesterday, I was standing on my spot and they drove by, calling me 'nigger' and stuff, throwing stuff at me. Then they turned around and tried to hit me. So I walked down here with [these guys]," says Reshan Craig.

That's the strange thing with human advertising: Sometimes people don't see the ad, just the person. That goes beyond bad marketing. Directional Concepts Regional Manager Kenny Carter is well aware of the troubles his sign-twirlers face, particularly in certain areas of town.

"It's common. We've got something happening every other weekend," says Carter. "Certain areas are prejudiced. Our colors are red and white, and when you got a black little kid wearing red and he's in a different neighborhood where they wear blue ... gangwise, that's not a good thing." When it comes to such trouble spots, Carter deploys older employees rather than kids. See, the older guys know when to back down (or run). "These young kids are more dangerous because kids don't have any remorse, they don't understand what certain [racial] words even mean, and they want to fight. Some people can deal with it, but young kids don't know how to deal with it ... Las Vegas is a big market, a dangerous market. If you don't know where you can go, you can get in trouble."

Carter's making a sly reference to his main competitor, Aarrow Advertising. If Directional Concepts is the valley's bland mainstay of human signage, Aarrow is the brash upstart. Founded in 2002 by college students Max Durovic and Michael Kenny, Aarrow brought its skate-style sign-spinners to Las Vegas in November, and it's since made a name for itself by forging an advertising philosophy that marries the culty salesmanship of Zig Ziglar with the big-trick flair of Tony Hawk.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, sign spinners P.J. Snovitch and Steven Bryce, both 15, are working the corner of Silverado Ranch Boulevard and Bermuda Road, and their shift suggests two young sunglassed mimes gone mad, as their ad signs become props in a panting frenzy to get attention from the passing stream of soccer moms and golf dads. Techno blaring in his headphones, Snovitch aims his arrow skyward in an air guitar-god parody, whirls it like a helicopter blade, flips it like skateboard. Why all this madness? Making eye contact is the goal. Once Snovitch nails that, the act continues: He urges drivers to honk their horns, he puts hand to head in a "call me" gesture, he offers a tentative thumbs-up for his performance -- all in hopes of directing their eyes to his KB Home sign.

"We're very sociable, very energetic. That's why we like this job so much. Whoever's shy, this isn't your job," says Snovitch. "I'm just out here, doing my everyday thing, you know, being really energetic, coming outside, just acting like myself, having fun." The two do get the occasional hater -- thrown coins or yelled words -- but they also get honks, waves, water, tips. Those are manna for the teenager who craves attention -- and, more importantly, leads to a unique form of brand recognition, say Aarrow executives.

"Traditional forms of advertising have decreased in effectiveness," says Aarrow CEO Max Durovic. He ticks off old-media mainstays: radio jingles, billboards, TV commercials. "Today, you can't reach the consumer like that. But if I can make eye contact with someone, and make that human spinteraction, it allows us to create a one-on-one advertising experience. For that split second, that ad is personalized for you."

Yes, Durovic said spinteraction, and he peppers his talk with other such cute wordplay. It's part of the culture of Aarrow, where the flash of extreme sports culture meets advertising's mandate to get your attention. Indeed, if the 21st century sees the Great Categorical Blur birthing such monsters as infotainment, advertorial and the fictional memoir, these kids are part of the phenom: extremevertising, dude! Radvertising, man! Is it an ad? It is a sport? Is it art? Is it commerce? If Glengarry Glenn Ross revealed salesmanship's desperate athletic dread, sign-spinning might be its physical counterpart. No wonder the Aarrow kids are told to take breaks every hour and keep at least a gallon of water on hand: This extreme sports ad lifestyle thing is hard work. (A tart, related irony to savor: There was a time in Las Vegas when skateboarding was an outlaw sport, and skaters used to steal plywood from home construction sites to build ramps. Now they hawk those new developments, plying skate-style flip tricks on corrugated plastic.)

"This is pretty much a whole new form of rock star," says 20-year-old Justin Brown, an Aarrow "spinstructor" who commands an arsenal of nearly 300 sign-spinning tricks with such names as the Suitcase Flair, the Chicken Wing and the Dislocator -- a painful-looking maneuver that involves him sweeping the sign over his head, back to front in a painful-looking, joint-cracking arc. "We're like a pop-up ad in real life that people like to see. They'll honk for us. People don't honk for an advertisement. I've never seen someone clap for a billboard. But this is advertising disguised as entertainment. People think we're just out here entertaining them, until they find out that it's an advertisement, and then they don't care."

But Brown -- like many Aarrow employees, weaned on marketing creed -- knows that they don't have to care for it to work. "It goes beyond conveying a message," he explains. "When you make somebody smile, and then they look at an ad immediately after that, it creates this subconscious association ... Especially if they do end up going in the sales office, which happens quite a bit, they're already in good mood. It's just really an extra push to increase subconscious brand recognition."

Despite the company's free-spirited vibe, make no mistake about its seriousness. Competition in the human sign industry involves all the usual corporate posturing. For instance, Aarow has copyrighted its encyclopedia of tricks, its sign construction, and is always aggressively scoping out new clients. If advertising is in fact the new extreme sport, it certainly shows in Aarrow sign-spinners' lore -- about humiliating rivals (sometimes promoting a development just across the street) or about coming down with "spin fever" -- a sort of corporate disease a sign-spinner develops. In short, he turns his spinning mania on everyday objects, whether books, pillows, food or cell phones, sending them into a playful spiral on a whim. True to the faith, Aarrow employees call these items "spinanimate objects."

"It gets to the point where I don't like to be without a sign," says Brown.

Perhaps the most acute form of spin fever. Even when he's not working, he's an ad.