A corporate SF mural made me cringe. Locals made me reconsider.

A temporary mural advertisement outside Atlas Cafe in the Mission that ran during the month of February in 2020. A temporary mural advertisement outside Atlas Cafe in the Mission that ran during the month of February in 2020. Photo: Dan Gentile Photo: Dan Gentile Image 1 of / 54 Caption Close A corporate SF mural made me cringe. Locals made me reconsider. 1 / 54 Back to Gallery

On an early February morning, I walked out onto my doorstep to see a love letter.

It was written on the wall of Atlas Café in the Mission, unsigned black text on a white wall informing me that someone cared so much that they would run up Lombard Street for me.

A week later, on Valentine’s Day, the anonymous art activation entered phase two. Underneath the hand-painted script, my special someone revealed themselves to be the beer brand Stella Artois, owned by global multinational alcohol distributor AB InBev.

San Francisco has some of the most stunning street art in the world, with walls around the city adorned with iconic murals. But what happens when brands join in on the party, turning quiet corners into Instagram bait?

At first glance, I cringed at the mural. No one wants to see a real-life pop-up ad when they step out of their home, especially one that reads like a slogan work-shopped to squeeze out influencer impressions. It felt like an invasion of a sleepy neighborhood corner without nearly enough traffic to justify its placement. And to make matters worse, this “localized” mural references an entirely different neighborhood.

But after exploring the issue more, I’ve realized that maybe it isn’t so simple.

Atlas has been in institution at 20th and Alabama streets since 1996, serving sandwiches, salads and live jazz to an eclectic crowd of regulars (also, shout-out to their robust magazine rack). But like most San Francisco small businesses, they’ve felt the squeeze in recent years.

“December, January and February have traditionally been our slowest months of the year. It’s gotten really tough just to break even,” says owner Bill Stone. When he received a call from art activation company Muros, he felt skeptical, but it’s hard to turn down such a large economic lifeline.

“I’d say it was about 10% of my sales for that month. It really made a big difference for me at a time when I was really feeling the pinch,” he says.

Coincidentally, the money also trickled down to a former Atlas employee. A resident of the Mission since 2004, sign painter David Benzler worked at the cafe a decade ago before becoming a full-time artist. The same company that contacted Stone found Benzler on Instagram and commissioned him for the work, which took 10 hours to paint. These types of jobs allow him to invest time in fine art projects instead of, well, working at Atlas.

“I’m a fine artist by trade; I got into sign painting because it’s an effective way to pay the bills,” he says.

Although situations get sticky when companies try to replace already existing art, as in a recent case in the Mission where a cannabis company painted over a 10-year-old Alien Love mural without permission, it’s hard to blame a business for monetizing an otherwise empty beige wall.

Jet Martinez, former curator of the Clarion Alley Mural Project and an artist in high demand for corporate commissions, feels that there’s space for both commercial and creative street art.

“I do feel like there’s enough walls for everybody,” he says. “There’s ads everywhere anyway. I’m an appreciator of the craft of painting. Sure, they’re by corporations, but it’s usually artists painting them who are really skilled, went to art school, and have a separate practice of their own.”

Muros, the Chicago-based company that orchestrated the activation, views their approach as an “art first” way to offer new opportunities to artists. Clients range from Shake Shack to Square to the Chicago Fire soccer team. Typically, there’s a large level of collaboration between artists and brands, but the Stella project was a brand-heavier campaign, with similar themed murals in Los Angeles (“I would drive to LAX and back for you”) and Chicago (“I need you more than gloves in February”).

The company finds the spaces by a combination of relationships with developers, networks of local artists and some good old-fashioned Google Maps street view. For Stella, it identified 15 potential locations in the Mission, then used geoframing data to decipher the demographics that traffic each area. The data harvested don’t include personally identifying data, but can be so specific as to identify users’ interests (like say, craft beer). After an ad has run, Muros combs social media to supply clients with statistics on just how many people stopped for a selfie.

This was Stella’s first mural in San Francisco, but likely not the last. It sees the burgeoning ad activation space as not only a new way to communicate with consumers, but a means of communication in itself.

“For many consumers now, the new method of communicating your feelings isn’t by sending a physical card or long penned love note,” said a representative from Stella via email, “but rather by snapping a picture of real life things happening in the world and texting it to your better half, bestie or mom along with a quick ‘thinking of you.’”

Personally, I expected the mural to last about two days before a tagger communicated their feelings about the mural with a can of spray paint. Benzler and Stone both had their doubts as well, but the mural ran the full month without being defaced.

“I was surprised it didn’t get tagged. I’ve seen things like ‘the Mission isn’t for sale’ or ‘stop gentrification’ on advertisements. Maybe nobody saw it,” laughs Stone. “But the old-school taggers in the neighborhood usually leave us alone.”

“Sign painting gets this weird credibility. It’s not graffiti, but it’s letters,” says Benzler. “It’s typographers talking to typographers. So graffiti writers usually leave those alone, because they can see the labor that someone put into it.”

But murals now suffer from a new type of tagging: the selfie. Although each artist we spoke to acknowledged Instagram’s positive effects on their careers and on the ubiquity of public art, it’s conceptually changed not just the way people interact with the pieces, and subsequently ads.

“When I’d paint pretty s--- on the street in the Mission back in the day, it felt like a revolutionary act,” says Martinez. “Now because everything’s entertainment, it’s more like another selfie wall.”

Seeing people use his art as a background for product shots or putting their feet up on the mural invokes an admittedly get-off-my-lawn reaction. “I’ll just be thinking, get your foot off the wall! Sometimes it feels like people have to put themselves in the photo of the mural to enjoy the art,” says Martinez.

The consequence, and hope of brands like Stella, is that these consumer habits will lead them not just to see the ad, but to see themselves in the ad … then put themselves in the ad. And thanks to the easy availability of digital data, advertisers now know just where to place those ads for the best return on investment.

Muros didn’t yet have any data to share on how many people actually photographed themselves proclaiming their willingness to run up Lombard, and I saw exactly zero selfie sticks over the course of the month, but Stone did notice an uptick in people stopping by what had previously been a plain beige wall.

After speaking with all parties involved, I felt a little embarrassed by my original reaction questioning how dare a much-loved-but-still-struggling institution monetize an otherwise unused space in one of the most expensive areas in the most expensive city in the world. Sure, for 28 days, my corner looked a little more ‘grammable and a little less “authentic,” but if that’s the tradeoff that keeps the pleasant sound of jazz flowing from the Atlas courtyard on weekends and a local artist pursuing their passion, so be it.

That said, I personally don’t plan on running up Lombard Street for anyone anytime soon.

Dan Gentile is a digital editor at SFGATE. Email: Dan.Gentile@sfgate.com | Twitter: @Dannosphere