Is this creepy?

You're stuck in a crowded train station. Something seems off with the ads. Is that the point?

My friend was in Boston on Sunday and texted photos of ads hanging from the rafters of South Station.

Do these seem odd to you? she wrote. They’re creeping me out honestly

Um, yeah, I wrote back.

Here they are

My hunch was that it was some B2B software company (for HR reviews, maybe?) drafting off of the current political climate.

I was off.

The campaign is for Anduril, a military defense company.

This felt even more chilling.

My next assumption was they’re advertising near MIT and other colleges to recruit engineering talent. (This time, I was right.)

The idea that a military industry player is advertising in the current political climate with marketing that looks as if anarchists took over a mass transit space felt bold, to say the least.

And yet, I kept clicking through.

Anduril’s site is pretty standard (if also well designed), outlining products, mission, the usual. The “Don’t Work at Anduril” campaign is supported by a cheeky video which, actually, reveals a clever, thought-through concept … and a very different painting of the military industrial complex. (I can beam myself to the internal premiere of this at an All Hands and witness the swell of pride from employees.)

The team clearly thought through a channel strategy, with content specific to each space. See the LinkedIn channel marketing below. The banner ad, smart; the profile update with the parody hashtag, brilliant.

The work was done entirely in-house by the first ever marketing exec lead at the company. (Clearly the marketing and creative team has a military defense level budget.)

The gamble is working. Applications for the company’s 650+ open jobs are up 30% since the campaign’s launch two weeks ago. (The campaign video has well more than 3 million views.)

What’s it all mean?

The experiences don’t match across the campaign channels - the site (traditional, serious) feels different from the video (whimsical, satirical) feels different from the OOH (bold, maybe terrifying in the context of a large crowded room of people taking mass transit?).

But perhaps that’s the point.

As I neared the end of the video, I watched a bomb roll across the screen (a bomb!), and I thought … would I work for Anduril?