I’m building a bit of a personal brand off shitposting IRL.
You see, dear reader, if you want to grab attention at scale, you usually need to accumulate an audience via consistent posting, community engagement, “quality content,” etcetera, etcetera on social media. I don’t have time for all that. I’m a very busy woman, with many important things to do.
The beautiful, serendipitous thing about flyering is you can just print whatever you want and tape it to poles and people have to see it. It’s crazy! They just let you do that. Long gone are the days when mom would put your shitty crayon drawings on the fridge, now, you can put your shitty graphic designs on the streets for all the world to see.
Enough foreplay, let’s get to the point. The beans. A versatile food, a staple among almost every culture. Some choosing to leverage these legumes for righteous, holy consumption (e.g. burritos), and some choosing to abuse them for sin (e.g. beans on toast). Beans themselves, I believe, are morally neutral, malleable in the hands of their artisan.
So what are the intentions of these artisans? And what do their bean-related choices say about the inherent good or evil of mankind? I could find no such prior investigations, whether scientific, philosophical, or juridicial in nature. So I took it upon myself to craft an assessment that spanned all three of these axes.
I began by sourcing members of the bean community. Like moths to a flame, they were drawn in by posters with a series of dogwhistles, known only to those most active in the society of legumes.
Although these posters appear quite similar to the novice eye, each actually elicits a different yet equally powerful emotion. Curiosity, envy, fear, love. For details on how each variation performed, see the appendix.
Each poster linked to the same survey, which asked a series of questions to aid my investigation, then collected some demographic information. Let us now delve into the data.
Question 1: We’ll start easy. I would hate to scare away any bean inquirers, curiously tiptoeing across the precipice of the vast, grand bean community for the first time. Nay, I welcome them wholeheartedly. As you can see, ~60% of bean inquirers identify as a “beany, beany, boy” and ~30% protest this classification, arguing (quite defensively, if I may say) that they “contain a normal, reasonable amount of beans.”
Question 2: A simple question - identify your tribe. However, if you do not feel comfortable doing so, I respect that, of course. Consent is both sexy and crucial, as is HIPAA.
Question 3: Now we approach the more controversial questions, where the virtues of man begin to reveal their true form.
Question 4: A picture paints a thousand words, and so a song must paint at least a couple hundred. Over half of respondents favor “Since you bean gone by Kelly Clarkson,” and the moral repercussions of this are significant. I’m sure you understand what I mean.
Question 5: We know so much about beans, some would argue too much. But what matters most to these bean inquirers?
Question 6: Will you open your eyes to the illuminating brilliance of bean knowledge, or will you quiver and retreat into the cavern shadows you’ve always know, stubbornly claiming to know all there is to know about beans?
Following the survey, I asked how old the inquirer was. Unfortunately yet understandably, many gave fake answers. With some data cleansing, here are the results:
I also provided an optional input for an email address, as well as a call for “questions, comments, or concerns.” While concerns were innumerable, so too was joy. See the appendix for an anonymized table of these responses.
To reward the respondents for their time, I randomly selected two winners and sent them each a one-way ticket to Chicago to see The Bean and then stay there forever. I’m not sure if they’ll actually go, but I very much hope they do.
Fun fact: in order to buy a ticket for someone else, you need to know their full name, zipcode, birthday, and phone number. This required a fair bit of internet sleuthing, but nothing good comes easy.
Dear reader, you may be interested to know that this is hardly my first flyering rodeo. I’ve zucced the city, I’ve summoned every Alex in San Francisco, I’ve growth-hacked my friends' love lives, I’ve enticed thousands of strangers to complete a series of puzzles and riddles and tricks over the course of a month. At this point I wonder if The Feds will try to stop me. If they will enact new flyering laws because of the havoc I wreck with my posters. It wouldn’t be the first time an institution had to instate new rules due to me getting a little too silly.
While the manual effort of flyering itself obviously doesn’t scale, almost always (in my experience) strangers will take photos of your posters and share them on reddit/twitter/X/x-cetera, and you’ll get the benefits of social media anyway, but much more organically, plus it fuels your God complex.
At the finale of the scavenger hunt I collaborated on (SF Pursuit), someone asked me, “How can I stay informed on your latest projects? Just keep an eye out for flyers on lamp posts?” And I unfortunately had to say, “Ha ha! Yeah, actually.”
Anyways, I hope you learned a thing or two about beans, and life, and maybe even love. I know I did.
Appendix:
Exhibit 1: Poster performance
I put up 160 posters, 40 each of 4 different designs. See how each performed below.
Note that on the charts, I marked when I put up posters, but how many I put up is shown as an approximate percent rather than a number, as I wasn’t tracking which variation I put up. (e.g. on Monday, May 27 I put up 50 total posters, but I’m not precisely sure how that 50 was divided up among versions 1, 2, 3, & 4, so instead I indicated that I put up ~31% of posters). I did put up roughly the same amount of each poster each day I flyered.
As you can see, beans version 1 (“they’re not what you think”) performed the best, with 208 total scans, followed by beans version 4 (“love bean”), with 182 total scans. Interestingly, this gap between the top performer and runner-up is much greater when looking at unique scans, with version 1 having 200 unique, and version 4 having 149 unique (more on-par with the performance of versions 2 and 3). I wonder why version 4 had people coming back for more. This also leads me to believe that seeding suspicion (“they’re not what you think”) is the superior way to grab an audience.
Another interesting observation is that the greatest total scans in one day came from version 4 (“love bean”), the day after placement in the Financial District on June 6. But there was not such a spike in versions 1-3. My hypothesis is that patrons of the Financial District (Finance and Tech folks) are desperately seeking affection, even to the point of seeking it in beans. And they HATE musicals.
Also, the worst performer overall was version 2, which advertised “BEANS: THE MUSICAL!” So if you’re thinking about making a musical about beans, I’d think again.
For a neighborhood-specific insight, the people of Hayes Valley enjoy feeling suspicious and threatened, with version 1 (“they’re not what you think”) and version 3 (“beancause he’s coming”) performing very well after flying exclusively there on June 8. However, they hate musicals (version 2) and love (version 4).
Of course, it would’ve been nice to have tracked the rate at which scans converted into a lead (form response) and quality lead (form response with a valid email and a funny question/comment/concern), but that would’ve required making copies of the google form, blah, blah, more work, and I honestly couldn’t be bothered. I do have a real job, you know.
Exhibit 2: Responses to the optional write-in for “questions, comments, and concerns”
Last names / any personal identifying info has been redacted.
please never stop writing this was the greatest use of freewill ever, I vote you for president
Crying because my chosen name is Beans
Please keep doing this it's so funny