Bairdyblog

Come in creatives, your time is up

Those of you in - or roughly adjacent to - Generation Y may be familiar with Current TV, a web site launched a couple of years ago by Al Gore, among others. It's a channel (available here on Virgin & Sky platforms) in which the content is created almost entirely by viewers.

Intriguingly, this includes advertising. How it works is simple - a 'sponsor' (ie advertiser) posts a very brief brief on the station's web site and then viewers produce commercials (or VCAMs - Viewer Created Advertising Messages) which are posted onto the site. Those which are broadcastable and receive the approval of the website viewing public get broadcast on the station, meaning their creators get a payment of at least one thousand pounds, and more if the ad gets syndicated.

Generally, 'sponsors' are currently hawking products of obvious interest to Gen Y (L'Oreal, games producers, Toyota Prius, and so on) which inspires content like this:

No obvious recruitment messages as yet, but it can only be a matter of time. (This would work well for graduate recruitment, clearly.) Not that recruitment-oriented UGC is a new concept, but frameworks such as this could make it cheaper and technologically easier to manage.

There's a sense that most VCAMs are generated by aspirant agency creatives and film directors, but that's no bad thing in itself - a recruitment strand here might serve to bring bright new talent, which has never heard of employment marketing, into the industry?

TMP & ReAgent break FEMAs

By the magic of the www we go to Australia, where at a lavish ceremony in Sydney the FEMA (Fairfax Employment Marketing Awards) have been magisterially doled out.

 

These are the closest the Aussies get to the likes of the RADs and CIPD/Guardians, but they're not quite up to those heady standards - the official website doesn't carry images of the winning work; the evening is a double-header with recruitment consultancy awards; all entries have to have run in a title run by the (admittedly mighty) Fairfax Media group.

Anyway, big winners of the ten or so gongs were TMP Australia and ReAgent, the agency established by ex Euro RSCGers Mike Beeley and Melanie Hirst (also ex of MSL, TCS, GMBM, WDAD). TMP won three for their work for ASIO (the Australian version of Mi5) and one for the Western Australia Department of Corrective Services. These wins are nicely displayed in the awards section of the agency's website, together with their 23 nominations. (Can't believe I overlooked the chance to make a gag about Aussies and Corrective Services, but there you go.)

Three awards too for ReAgent' s work for IBM graduates, including a video-led site in which people called things like Jordana, Kathleen and Xavier chat about their careers to date. This campaign won the coveted 'Most Creative/Most Innovative' category, and so looks like the benchmark against which most Aussie efforts should be judged.

Shoosmiths: not entirely cobblers

Imagine a weird version of Just A Minute where, rather than asking contestants to talk about a given subject for sixty seconds, they have to recycle every rec ad cliche they can think of. Actually, don't imagine it - just take a look at the first Shoosmiths video on job telly web site my-ijob.com.

Back to Shoosmiths in a moment. First, if you haven't seen this job site yet, you should, because it's (kind of) the future. Basically it's a job board dedicated to video. Some clients are using it and just uploading commercials and other bits of generic film they have knocking around their offices, whilst others have actually taken the trouble to do something specifically career-related.

Shoosmiths, the 'unstuffy' law firm with what looks like a rip-off WHSmith logo, have three videos which aren't that bad. Yes, there are cliches and strange bits. The guy with the pink shirt and tie saying it's all 'fun' doesn't work, and there's never any need to talk about 'really making a difference'. The final tracking shot of a penny farthing stuck on a wall made me smile; it's probably where they got the idea for the production budget.

But what's encouraging is the fact that it's there at all. The organisation has clearly prioritised the importance of making it and has done so with refreshing honesty. It's always good to see employers recognising that yes, at times and without a following wind, working days can be a little bit crap.

The problem remains the same as other online recruitment videos, which is that when people have a video camera and editing suite to play with they seem to forget the importance of determining what the recruitment message should be and articulating it in a consistent, compelling way.

I'm not saying that these things should be scripted. I am saying that (fewer) propositions should be agreed first and that interviewees should be roughly following the same lines.

Anyway, other video on this site that's worth a quick gander comes from Nokia, Astra Zeneca and Morgan Stanley.

'Little Gordon' shows the f&*^ing way

Picked this up from Sinead Bunting's post on Digital Recruiting.

It's a good example of how to make an intelligent, funny, inexpensive viral. Not beyond the ability of any the usual rec ad creative departments (although there are some elements to the content that wouldn't be supported by a conservative client.)

Whilst the last shot is probably my favourite, I can't help but think that they missed a trick by not delivering a killer line at the end. ('Some people have their futures mapped out. For everyone else, there's caterer.com', or something like it?)

YouTube also has Parts 1 and 3 (this is 2) which are almost as good.

Diverse and worse

Diversity advertising. In anybody's language, it's usually crap.

The problem, of course, is finding an execution - particularly a visual execution - that isn't predictable, patronising or already done to death. Most attempts to portray organisational commitment to diversity choose to use group shots: one male, one female, one Afro-Caribbean, one with a skull-cap/wheelchair/Judy Garland album. If it ever did work, it ain't working now.

The US ad blogs enjoy finding the worst offenders. You can find some of these being intelligently disparaged at multicultclassics. If you have any truly deplorable examples of your own, I'd like to see them - perhaps we can hold a ceremony in which we celebrate the truly di-verse-abolical. (The Di-Worse-ity Awards, anyone?)

Anyway, to get the creative juices flowing for your next diversity brief, I've found some online that aren't entirely rubbish. I'm not saying they're brilliant, but the puke factors are relatively low.

Try this internal poster from the IT department at Penn State University:

Or this web banner from US law firm Bingham:

And this pleasantly objectionable explosion in a fairy tale factory from the Association of American Advertising Agencies:

On second thoughts, that last one has put me right off my tea.

Second-class posts

Candidate attraction now largely means job boards. There must be eleventy squillion postings on the UK boards alone. (Citation needed.) So why can't I find one that's properly written?

Last week I was looking at totaljobs - which isn't a particularly bad example, they're all much of a muchness - and browsing through the postings of a globally-recognised London retailer. Every single one read badly. There are few spelling errors as such, but plenty of mistakes that simply shouldn't be there, particularly for such an illustrious brand.

What mistakes? Hmm. Question marks bang in the middle of sentences. No spacing between sentences. No understanding of where hyphens should go. Clumsy repetition. Run-on sentences (in a posting for a Copywriter). Clumsy repetition. The same job title capitalised differently in consecutive posts. Errant capitalisation generally. Cut-and-paste laziness (which means some, but not all, postings begin with 'Job Description'). One opening paragraph which is - amazingly - 210 words long. (I counted them.)

I understand that the person writing these postings is not a dedicated copywriter. I'm sure they're a brilliant HR admin, recruitment manager or RPO consultant. And many of these errors might be down to posting systems. But things must be improved. It's not just a question of aesthetics. It's a question of your message being sufficiently compelling to lure, and secure, your ideal candidate.

Ways to improve the situation, if you're an employer:

• Get a writer (agency or in-house) to edit your copy if it's not your strong suit.
• Write to a firm template.
• Use more bullet points. (Less room to make grammatical errors.)
• Arrange for an expert to create a 'Style Guide'.

More laterally, I wonder what copy-polishing services are offered by the job boards themselves? Volume may prohibit it in some cases, but it could prove to be a USP  in an increasingly tight market.

Years ago, when we poor agency copywriters wrote 38 ads a day for the Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph print recruitment sections, we had something called the 5 Paragraph Structure that would keep us on the straight and narrow if we were tired, bored, hungover or just generally incompetent. I'll dust it off and adopt it for the current era in a future post. (Particularly because I've just googled guides to writing job postings, and they're all crap.)

High Noon and the history of rec ad

A while ago I had an idea for explaining the differences between the three historic eras of recruitment advertising.

Think of the Gary Cooper character (Kane) in High Noon. The part where he's trying to recruit deputies to help fight the evil Frank Miller (and shoot him dead, tra la). With all the menfolk in the town gathered in the saloon, Kane can try a number of different approaches.

He can say: 'Who wants to be a deputy?' This is representative of the first era of rec ad (often referred to as tombstone or simple sits vac advertising). It's like a basic ad which just has the job title at the top of it, and no reason for anyone to apply short of being jobless.

He can say: 'Help me fight Frank Miller, and there's a chance he won't take your women and cattle.' This represents propositional advertising. The employer (Kane) is given his audience a reason to apply - a 'What's In It For Me?' message designed to engineer response from an otherwise uninterested (or passive) market.

Or he can hold up a deputy's badge and ask: 'Who wants one of these?' This is employer branding. All the propositions of the role - the status, the worthwhileness of community involvement, the protection of self-interest - have all been bound up in a shorthand form (the badge) that the candidate constituency has already come to understand and respect.

Next time: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the emergence of retention theory.

TMP exercises Perth control

Whilst trying to track down an old friend, I found my way to the TMP.com worldwide locations page.

The major news agencies have missed it, but TMP seems to have moved Perth (carefully, I hope) from its old position in Western Australia and plonked it bang on top of Hobart.

Usually copywriters whine about the art department not having a good enough grasp of English; looks like designers stateside could do with a brush-up in Geography too.

Sainsbury's: employer branding by default?

Every so often a TV commercial comes along that features an 'employee' of the advertising organisation - think Halifax, KFC and Kwik-Fit - that pretty well defines the employee experience for the multitude. Sainsbo's are the latest to take this route, with their ITV2-heavy 'Back To Work' campaign featuring 42 year-old single mum, Sarah.

Sainsburys - Back to..
Watch the ad...

Ignore the fact that Sarah is quite obviously Tricia from Corrie (harassed single Mum and, if I remember correctly, one time squeeze of dubious lothario Curly Watts) if you can. The question here is - is this a conscious effort to articulate the Sainsbury's EB as it pertains to in-store employees, or has (once again) HR been steamrollered by their more muscular siblings in the Marketing Dept?

Let's look at the ad and see what it tells us about working in-store at Sainsbo's:

1. They're more than happy to hire 42 year-old single mums.
2. There's camaraderie in the workplace. (Witness Sarah's wave to the guy pushing the trolleys, and her banter with the colleague at the end.)
3. It's somehow fun. ('I'm having a great time'.)
4. It's a good way to generate ideas for feeding your boisterous family on the cheap.

All this is fine, if pretty familiar fare for retail recruitment. And you can argue that it's stronger than what appears in the 'Great Place To Work' page on the Sainbury's site. There, you have to wade through all the HR-centric rhetoric about people policies, diversity and CSR before you get to the meagre employee-centric propositions about development, recognition and reward.

So, it doesn't actually conflict, but it doesn't marry up that much either. Perhaps it'll develop as the campaign continues. (Sarah gets to meet Jamie Oliver in the next installment.)

The point of all this: more people will develop an understanding of the Sainsbo's EB from this commercial (with its multi-million media spend) than from any of the rec ads, web pages and in-store bumpf the HR dept is producing.

So did HR and Marketing converse on this - and if not, why not?

BS deserves at least a B++

A bit of chat in the UK digital recruitment space about this latest effort from the Marketing Department at Zurich Financial Services. (I found it on the often excellent Digital Recruiting blog.) It's a brave idea - possibly the client thought such a left-brain concept necessary given the challenge of getting right-thinking individuals to work in financial services nowadays.

Basically, we begin with the comic set-up of 'BS Recruitment' in the unctuous form of 'Barnabas Smythe', who proceeds to sell us a range of crap, over-inflated jobs that even come with their own comic video profiles. (Interesting that this genre is being parodied without even having its own rules set up first.)

Once the penny's dropped, and you realise that the site's a McGuffin, you get transported to the actual ZFS site where a nice lady tells you about proper jobs.

Things I like about it:

1. Someone's spent time and money on the creative.
2. It's been written reasonably well. (Couple of duff lines in the intro to BS, though.)
3. Little details, like the 'hiring' company logos, have had some thought given to them.
4. Looks like they've hired proper actors rather than people around the agency who can 'act a little'.
5. The crap employment propositions are clever reflections of the actual ZFS employment propositions.
6. The transition between 'sites' is a lovely thing.

I'm less sure about:

1. Is there too much 'creative energy' on the BS side, making the ZFS side seem a bit dull?
2. Is the parody too overboard? (I'm thinking of the glint on Barney's teeth.)
3. Do the job 'profiles' go on just a moment too long?
4. Is the stapler game a step too far?
5. Is there something slightly sinister about the 'ZFS' woman? Maybe it's the languorous speed with which she talks. (There's also a slight speech impediment, which is distracting.)
6. Is there a point in parodying recruitment consultants? Will this piece be of more interest to rec cons laughing at themselves than marketeers enjoying a parody at the expense of a different industry?

Still, all credit to whoever did this. (Anyone know?) An interesting benchmark by which to judge future efforts. And as I said at the outset, sufficiently financed to make other clients look shoddy in comparison if they don't put their hands at least half way into their pockets.