At least as I see it, the big problem right now is that the background intrudes too much into the picture -- in fact, it almost looks like it's intended to be a picture of the building, and this ad just happened to be in the way.

There are a number of possibilities for making the subject stand out more. First, I'd almost certainly cross the street so you're shooting along the street instead of across it. At least in most cases, this means most of the background will be a lot farther away.

Then I'd consider one of two approaches:

1. Get quite close and shoot upward with a much wider-angle lens (if you have one). This will tend to exaggerate the height (probably a good thing in this case) and makes objects in the background get a lot smaller in a hurry.
2. The direct opposite of #2: back away a bit farther (still along the same side of the street though) and use a very large aperture (small aperture number) to minimize the depth of field to blur the background as much as possible.

If there's just the one ad like this (in sight) the first is probably preferable, especially if you can get nice weather so most of the background is a nice, blue sky (but yes, I realize how common that is in San Francisco...)

If you have a number of the ads in sight, then #2 might be better, assuming you can line things up so you have the one in focus, and more of the same making up a substantial part of the background. If you can get them to nearly fill the frame, it might be worth using more depth of field to get more of them (reasonably) sharp, forming a repeating pattern -- but only if you can keep from adding distractions in the process.

At least as I see it, the big problem right now is that the background intrudes too much into the picture -- in fact, it almost looks like it's intended to be a picture of the building, and this ad just happened to be in the way.

There are a number of possibilities for making the subject stand out more. First, I'd almost certainly cross the street so you're shooting along the street instead of across it. At least in most cases, this means most of the background will be a lot farther away.

Then I'd consider one of two approaches:

1. Get quite close and shoot upward with a much wider-angle lens (if you have one). This will tend to exaggerate the height (probably a good thing in this case) and makes objects in the background get a lot smaller in a hurry.
2. The direct opposite of #2: back away a bit farther (still along the same side of the street though) and use a very large aperture (small aperture number) to minimize the depth of field to blur the background as much as possible.

If there's just the one ad like this (in sight) the first is probably preferable, especially if you can get nice weather so most of the background is a nice, blue sky (but yes, I realize how uncommon that is in San Francisco...)

If you have a number of the ads in sight, then #2 might be better, assuming you can line things up so you have the one in focus, and more of the same making up a substantial part of the background. If you can get them to nearly fill the frame, it might be worth using more depth of field to get more of them (reasonably) sharp, forming a repeating pattern -- but only if you can keep from adding distractions in the process.

It might be interesting to try a variation of that last idea even if there's only the one ad in sight, but with other light poles in the background as kind of metaphorical giraffes. It's hard to guess how well that kind of thing will work until you see it though (and sometimes even after you take the picture, it's hard to decide whether it really worked or not). The more metaphorical you get, the more sophisticated the audience needs to be to have a hope of "getting" it.