[jwilber]

You can wax philosophical all day, but nobody is mentioning the downfall of Salesforce.

People aren’t arguing against the merit of advertising. The argument is against the specific case of a massive, already well-recognized and widely-integrated SaaS company paying a specific actor 10 million, while doing layoffs, and the benefit that actor brings versus those laid off.

If Salesforce just started, maybe the name recognition would make sense. My personal belief is that the company is too big already for it to matter. I also don’t think middle-aged CEO’s understand marketing as well as they think: every A-list celebrity advertising campaign I can think of has, from the outside looking in, appeared to go poorly (eg Coinbase).

[erulabs]

Either you're wrong, or you're a marketing genius who's perspective and ideas can change the industry. If it's the former, a lot of highly paid people aren't idiots. If it's the latter, you should probably go out there and change the world!