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page. 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.
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