If you ever visit washington DC it is absolutely wild the kind of things that are advertised via billboard. Raytheon making sure everyone knows where to get their missiles etc.
I still think it's super wild, but after thinking about it it's a lot like IT in big companies. Someone cold emails your boss and all of the sudden you're demoing some random doodad. In DC, your boss sees a fighter jet engine upgrade ad when walking into the Pentagon from the metro, and...
(I literally saw that exact ad at the pentagon metro station. who buys a 30 million dollar engine upgrade off of a metro ad?)
When my country was tendering for new fighter jets a few years ago there were a lot of ads on various social media. Since random civilians like yours truly seldom impulse buy $100M latest generation fighter jets, I presume the goal was to influence public opinion and politicians to lean on the actual procurement organization that was responsible for arriving at a recommendation for the next generation jet. Still, it all seemed pretty far fetched, or maybe the vendors just had a poor understanding of how such procurement programs are run in my country.
I noticed the same when I drove around the San Francisco Bay Area, except targeted at IT professionals. Just like with DC, it makes sense - target the eyes of the people who can influence decisions that actually financially matter.
Get outside of these bubbles, though, and it's all lawyers, casinos, car dealerships, and sex shops.
