Monster’s Super Bowl Ad features violinist, but there are no violinist jobs on Monster

February 8, 2010 | (No Comments)

As regular readers of Stone know, I am a huge fan of Monster’s historic role in advertising the internet as a comprehensive resource for the job search. In particular, their 1999 Ad “When I Grow Up” is easily one of the Top Five Super Bowl commercials of all time, and they have done other ground-breaking work.

That’s why I’m baffled at this year’s entry. Their Super Bowl ad this year features a fiddling beaver that searches on Monster.com for ‘violinist’. The beaver ends up getting the job, the girl, and the fancy limo ride through New York City.

There’s just one problem.

There are no violinist jobs on Monster:

And it’s not just that there are no violinist jobs on Monster today, but there are likely very few violinist jobs ever posted on Monster or elsewhere. Certain professions — the performing arts, law firm attorneys (as opposed to corporate counsel), hospital physicians, etc. — have not adopted the internet as a means for finding their next position. This is largely due to historical reasons, the nature of the work involved, and the way in which post-graduate-school recruiting works. Even Indeed.com, the ‘Google of job search engines’, only shows openings for violin teachers, and none for professional violinists.

Now I’m all for metaphor in commercial advertising — heck, TheLadders’ most famous ad shows the pandemonium that occurs on a tennis court to illustrate the point that “When you let everyone play, nobody wins” — but it does seem to me that the particular use of your product that you actually highlight in your television advertisement ought to be germane to the way your service in fact works, even if you are illustrating the case by using a primarily nocturnal, large, semi-aquatic rodent of the genus Castor.

There are tens of thousands of jobs on Monster, and there’s nothing for them to be ashamed of. So couldn’t they have featured a position that is more typical of the types of roles one will actually find on their service?

UPDATE: Going through all the Super Bowl commercials now, and the other company that showed it’s internet product in actual use was Google. And I think they did a brilliant job in demonstrating what you can actually use Google for, while telling a real sweetheart story in the process.

Perhaps no single human being has ever used Google to study in Paris, meet a girl, find a job and get married there, but each of the demonstrated searches tell us a little bit more about what Google can (magically) do:
- Auto-complete your searches
- Correct you when you misspell “Louvre”
- Display locations of your search results on a map
- Translate sentences from a foreign language
- Teach you the difference between truffles and Truffaut
- Tell you the status of your flight
- Find a job abroad

There’s a certain poignancy to the ad that I really admired. Google is, in some ways, our confessor: we type our hopes, dreams, fears, ambitions, and desires into the search box and are presented with the answers. Who hasn’t admitted something to Google in the privacy of their own laptop that they’re hesitant to share with even the closest of friends?

So while the USAToday AdMeter panel differs with me dramatically, I thought the Google ad was one of the best in the game: it told a very human story (with a happy ending) and showed many of the amazing ways you can use their site.