Have you ever been on public transit in DC? There are billboards all over the place (or were a decade ago when I was there last) that are clearly sales efforts targeting like 4 people. It's not that weird.

Extremely accurate. L3Harris pumped so much ad money into the walkways at Dulles I'm surprised they don't have naming rights to a terminal. There was a time not too long ago where you couldn't listen to WTOP without hearing Mitre and ManTech ads with the term "Digital Twin".

Which like, seems entirely rational? You're a sales team pursuing a deal with an 8-9 figure outcome, of course you would buy a billboard on on the decision maker's commute, it's a rounding error expense.

Completely rational. It makes sense that an area with a highest concentration of defense/government contractors would see a ton of ads geared towards the procurement folks. I grew up in the beltway and interned with some bigger defense contractors in college, just pointing out that it's a phenomenon unique to the DMV area (with some more memorable examples).

Again, not normal humans.

Absolutely more normal than someone paranoid they might reveal their MBTI.

I have not, though this doesn't surprise me from seeing how lobbyists buy ads on TV and the net. What I'm saying is that the people paying $$$ to communicate with US Senators or Fortune 500 CEOs like that are operating on a different level from regular people.

If you write a letter to the newspaper, you might hope to influence one person, or the general audience of the paper. If you feel so strongly about something that you compose an op-ed, you'll also have to do the work of persuading a feature editor to publish it (although this isn't too hard, if it seems like it fills the news hole). That's a bit less accessible than a letter to the editor. If you're buying full page ads, you're leveraging capital that most people don't have to go outside of regular interpersonal communication channels.

I think they're operating on the level of people who are working to close deals worth 8-9 figures who know exactly where the 4 decision makers they're targeting are going to be at 8:30AM and 5:30PM. There's not much more to it than that; the only real observation to make here is "these deals are worth a lot of money".

I've priced doing billboards just for funsies --- to make a (snarky) point, not to make money. It's not that expensive! Also: how could it be? Look at some of the terrible billboards out there. There are a series of I-55 billboards advertising a single self-published book of poetry.

Your original statement was "normal humans don't try to communicate directly with each other through the media". I think you're using a pretty idiosyncratic definition of "normal" there. The phenomenon you're labeling abnormal is I think actually pretty common.

B2B companies do this via LinkedIn ads on the regular.

While creepier, tbh, that is also not actually very unusual for the kinds of contracts Palantir takes on.