But, we've gotten a number of notes from several of the company's Executive Vice Presidents:

Please, your reaction is a bit much. The ad
was a humorous take that people
DO get a great high when they finally land
their dream job. You missed the
point. Remember the card said software
engineer not mail room clerk.

I know you love to take shots at the big dog
but an ad is an ad. They
aren't meant to change the social fabric.
They just get your attention for
a couple seconds and if you are lucky someone
vaguely remembers your brand
when the time is right.

Your comments concern me and have prompted me to
immediately stop receiving your daily comments via the
ERN. I simply no longer see the value in your daily column.

We are trying to have fun in an extremely competitive
business. Monster.com continues to be the the
market leader and destination of choice for job seekers.
Apparently our clients and 12 million members have the
ability to appreciate comedy, you do not.

An ad is much more than an ad. It is a statement of the company's core values and the face it wants to present to a certain part of its audience. You can probably understand how easy this mistake was to make.

Online job hunting, as you probably know, happens between 11AM on the East coast through about 2PM on the west coast. This is the time when most job hunters hit the web. Traffic is very high during these hours, accounting for over 60% of the traffic to the major sites. In other words, people look for new jobs while they are on the job, using their employer's web connection. This is why features like "panic buttons", that immediately click over to Yahoo or another innocuous site are so popular on the smaller job boards. Looking for work online is often done by a job hunter who is constantly paranoid that the boss will be walking by.

Knowing that this is a part of the audience, we're sure that the ad development groups focused on that part of Job Hunting. The behavior is very similar to other difficult problems as is the target audience.

While we certainly don't believe that anyone at Monster is actively championing "at work drug consumption", we do think they should give themselves some careful scrutiny. The difference between overt sanction - encouragement and a "knowing wink" is not always very large. Unfortunately, there are many issues in HR that can be triggered into play with a "knowing wink". None of them are funny enough to use as the gag line for a branding play in our space.

We doubt that this single episode will be enough to teach Monster the things it needs to do as it matures. A few customers will stop using the service because they don't see the humor. For the most part, it simply underlines the lack of sensitivity the company has for its market.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.


Jobhead

---

(January 29, 2001) We're old enough to have seen the casualties. The glamorous high turns squarely into unfettered addiction. Families crumble and twist while bright talent spins into an eddy of compulsive, self-destructive behavior. Limos and champagne seem to go well with the start; fat egos need high potency thrills. While we're hardly virulent in our posture on drugs, we have seen the damage and counsel extreme caution. We work to keep it out of our workplace.

Imagine this commercial:

An obviously underemployed young man is handed a "palmed" gift on the job. With obvious enthusiasm, he slides it under something laying loosely on his desk, to hide it. From time to time he eyes it, pulling back the papers to see his gift. When he can not stand to wait any longer, he lifts it to his nose and snorts the entire thing. It's the look in his eyes that tells you how potent his compulsion is and how good this stuff makes him feel. A picture of a green demon appears in the background.

A well wrought anti-drug public affairs spot brought to you by Robert Downey, Jr.?

Hardly!

This is the piece that Monster paid so much money to run on the Superbowl.

To say we have strongly mixed emotions about the commercial would be to soft pedal the reality. Of course, we're not so humorless that we don't understand the underlying message "A New Job Will Make You Feel Better". We've repeatedly congratulated the TMP team for their tireless efforts to broaden the job market. This appears to be yet another well intentioned attempt to reach beyond the traditional active job hunter to ferret out new resumes.

We're betting that the advertising argument was won by the side that claimed "They'll remember this one." Branding, you know, is a game of finding the edge of propriety and gluing to your name so that people will remember it. Taken to extremes, it's a justification for all sorts of bizarre behavior.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, Monster is the leading brand in the industry. When it goes to the extreme of positioning job boards as a way for the down trodden and depressed to get high, it creates a dynamic that rubs off on the rest of us. From where we sit, the last thing we need is for the rest of the world to perceive the industry as a home for compulsive job heads.

At the worst, it accentuates the attrition problem paying customers open themselves to when they advertise their jobs on a service that turns around and uses its executive search arm to recruit existing employees. At best, it paints a picture of an operation that is reaching out to the dregs to maintain growth. In either case, the image is bad for all of us.

Last year's NASDAQ earthquake will probably have a number of follow-on after shocks. We hope, for Monster's sake, that arrogance isn't a structural weakness. If it is, their days are numbered in a way that we didn't imagine till we witnessed this particular abomination.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.

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Materials written
by John Sumser
© TwoColorHat.
All Rights Reserved.