That was four or five years ago, and it seems like since then there’s only been growth in this medium. When I moved back to California in 2007, I started noticing significantly more human sign holders. Maybe the warmer weather makes it easier to attract humans willing to stand outdoors for four to eight hours at a time. (Edit: Sure enough, the Wikipedia entry on Human Billboards bears this theory out). Regardless, having personally seen thousands of human sign holders I’ve noticed a clear pattern. With very few notable exceptions, these sign holders look ashamed, bored and lazy.

This isn’t surprising. I wouldn’t be terribly motivated to be the best human sign holder I could be were I making $8 an hour, inhaling car exhaust and being stared at by bemused motorists all day. Who would? According to the Wikipedia entry I linked to above, some companies actually specialize in human sign holder marketing, going so far as to hold bootcamps where they train their humans to be awesome twirlers. I’ve seen a few that actually stand out with real energy, dance moves and enthusiasm. Seriously, good for them. They take pride in what they do and they appear to have some fun doing it. But again, this breed of sign holder seems to be very rare. The vast majority are of the “F*ck my life” variety, out there as a last resort and just trying to make a few quick bucks.

My (Fictional) Human Sign Holder Company

After my drive this afternoon I started thinking about how I would run one of these crews, how I would differentiate and become the go-to Human Sign Holder Company in my area. This is how I would do it:

#1. Recruiting

For this type of job, I think this biggest hiring mistakes that get made are likely via Craigslist and internal employee assignments. Think for a moment about the quality of applicants you’re going to get on Craigslist for your sign holder position. Have you ever tried to buy or sell anything on Craigslist? I’m convinced it’s the largest pool of flakes and creeps in the world and besides, it’s just not targeted enough. We definitely need to be more selective in our recruitment channels.

I also have a hunch that a good percentage of human sign holders are just unlucky employees that get assigned to “sign holder” duty. They were probably hired to make pizzas or work the cash register, but end up occasionally getting the “loser” shift out on the corner holding the huge arrow and trying to hide their face the whole time. This exact scenario was actually depicted hilariously in a recent movie, Sex Drive.

This is ineffective for the obvious reason that the employee probably didn’t sign up for this, and subsequently has zero enthusiasm for it (probably compounded by co-workers laughing at the unfortunate employee’s fate).

So, where can we go to find the right human sign holder talent? My company is going to recruit primarily from one source: The Theater/Performing Arts Departments of every local college within 30 miles. These students are actually eager to perform and be seen, and many of them probably have some raw talent to boot. With the right training and motivation (financial and otherwise), they will provide an excellent targeted labor pool with an endless supply of promising new candidates.

#2. Employee Motivation

Another huge problem for human sign holders is a lack of financial and professional motivation. The vast majority of sign holders clearly consider these jobs to be “throwaway”, since they could make the same money cleaning the grease traps at KFC.

Here’s how my company will fix that (in addition to recruiting the right people in the first place):

• Our employees are not Holders. They are Performers.
• We pay $15 per hour. It will cost the customer more than hiring the competition, but we’ll be positioning ourselves as the absolute best and most effective at driving traffic. You get what you pay for. This will also create competition between candidates, giving us the opportunity to select the best possible Performers for the job.
• Performers have some skin in the game with referral commissions. Their signs feature big-ass callouts: “Tell them Joe sent you!” This is the equivalent of affiliate id’s, and won’t be their real names. Our customers agree to track referrals (to their benefit since they can measure Performer effectiveness) and we pay a $10 bonus for each “conversion”.
• No humiliating costumes. Our employees wear sharp, professional and bright uniforms (dockers and polo shirt), matching baseball hats and aviator sunglasses. This serves the dual purpose of creating a consistent brand for our company and also providing our Performers with some level of anonymity.
• As a general rule, we’ll locate Performers as far away from their own community as possible to help them be more comfortable in their performance element.

#3. Training, Management and Feedback

Anyone can stick a drunk in a t-shirt on a corner with no training. Our employees will get paid training at a 3-day clinic taught by local dance instructors, acting coaches and veteran company Performers. As I mentioned earlier, it looks like some forward-thinking companies in this space already do this to some extent, but I think that adding the acting element is an important complement to the dance element, as it will allow each Performer to contribute their own personality and unique energy to the job (something they should already have to build on since they’re mostly Performing Arts students). The training will focus on effective performance techniques that drive the most traffic. Including insight from veteran Performers introduces real-world perspective and new ideas into the training.

Each new Performer will be paired with a veteran Performer for the first couple of shifts. This will allow them to observe a seasoned Performer in action and to overcome any initial “stage fright” they might have. A crew manager will be responsible for monitoring all Performers with random drive-bys, although effectiveness will be measured mostly by conversions.

Within 24 hours of the end of their shift, Performers will be able to track their conversions for the day from our employee website and read any manager notes. They will also use this site to get their next assignment details and provide feedback to their manager.

Conclusion

Would these ideas work? I don’t know, but it would be interesting to test them out. At the very least, it would be great to not have to see so many suicidal-looking human sign holders on the weekends.

Red is most commonly associated with things like:

• Stop
• Delete
• Unavailable

Maybe the UI team at Fandango had a good reason to do this (or perhaps internal testing bears out that this somehow improves conversion rates for ticket purchases), but anything that causes the user to hesitate or have to think for even a few more seconds should be reevaluated. This, of course, was the point of Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think“.

In my simple mockover, I’ve changed the available showtimes to bold green and removed the showtimes that are no longer available (why were they shown in the first place?) I’ve also increased the size of the “Tickets” badge to draw more attention to the showtimes as the main call to action.

This is total “Monday Morning” armchair User Interface Design, and as I mentioned before, the Fandango team might have data to prove me otherwise. But my instinct is that my mockover design represents a more intuitive user experience.

“Have I ever told you about GoGrid?”

It’s like being at a car dealership, expressing the slightest interest in a car, and then having the Eugene Levy salesman follow you everywhere you go for weeks after you leave the lot. I guess in the end they might win. After all, I’m fully aware of GoGrid now that it’s become my online shadow. Perhaps that Metallic Pea Family Truckster is just the vehicle I’ve been looking for.

Down here in L.A., it’s common to hear people refer to our high cost of living as the “sunshine” tax. In other words, all that money vanishing from your wallet is just the price you pay to enjoy the nice weather here, since we certainly don’t have the best-maintained roads or public schools. It’s meant to be a joke, but I’ve actually started considering this to be close to the truth.

So I have to ask myself, am I willing to pay a 10% tax on everything simply for more sunshine? Some argue that it’s money well-spent to be in a place like the Bay Area, where you get this magical blend of startuppy goodness that can’t be found anywhere else. Okay. But what about places like Austin? Or Portland? Or Boulder? They all have strong or growing startup communities without the sunshine tax. Hell, the Denver area has 300 days of sunshine (I actually lived there for two years). It’s just not the warm, Mediterranean sunshine we have here. But since I’m indoors 90% of the time, does the temperature really matter? I just want to see a pretty picture when I look out the window.

Maybe if you’ve bought a ticket in the Google lotto as a VC-funded startup chasing $10 Million financing rounds, it makes a lot of sense to be here. But for bootstrappers trying to maximize every dollar and minimize every expense? The bottom line is that California is coasting on past performance, not present reality.

Don’t Stop Believin’ (Swing Version) by plamere

As I began to go through my collection of names, there were some obvious losers to cut right away and let expire (Orchards4Sale.com, anyone?). I must have been smoking crack the night I bought that one. But for at least 80% of the other names, I had this strange, almost sentimental attachment to them. Seeing the names again would make fresh the original basic idea that had spawned the purchase. After going through about ten of these “memory lane” category names, I realized that buying domain names can really become an addiction. Like crack, although I wouldn’t know from experience. Were I to ever try drugs, I’d probably go the Steve Jobs route and drop acid or something. But I digress.

As someone who likes to formulate ideas for products, apps and services in my head, I’ll frequently start dreaming up the perfect brands for these vague, vaporware concepts. I know I’m not the only one, but I’m among the maybe 5% of people who will actually throw the money at a name I like. I’ll usually check IDS to see if I can hand-register an available name. If it’s unavailable, my next move is usually to visit the site and see if it’s actually being used. Nine times out of ten, it’s a parked page that’s been squatted on for several years. In that case, I’ll head over to Whois the thing and gauge whether or not I could make a reasonable offer and expect to get a response. Again, nine times out of ten you’ll get either no reply, or you’ll get a ridiculous response from the current owner that they’ll sell it to you for the right price, which usually turns out to be $100,000. At which point you laugh out loud, then get kind of pissy about it, and eventually move on.

But the problem with buying domain names is the same as the problem with dreaming up ideas:

1. They’re cheap.
2. They’re the easy part.

It’s too damn easy to sit in front of your browser and dream up the perfect name for this great idea that you haven’t done a single damn thing to actually execute on. For most people, $10 is chickenshit money to throw at a good name. If you pull in decent bucks, even dropping $500 or $2,000 at a great name isn’t out of the question. But a domain name by itself is as worthless as the idea that resulted in the registration. Unless you actually do something with it, it sits on a shelf covered in cobwebs (or the web version of cobwebs: Garbage network link ads).

Some names have intrinsic value, and can be held as a form of investment (Candy.com sold for $3Million). But let’s be honest. 99.99% of registered domains are total crap. In the past week I gave myself an instant $1,400 a year raise by turning off the auto-renew registration on nearly half my names. Over the next few months I’m planning to sell off any remaining domains of value in my account that are not tied to a project I am actively working on. Any money I make from the sales will go right into my bootstrap savings account. I’m weaning myself off the crack.