CareerBuilder.com’s cyclical marketing campaign is renewed every January, when people “wake up on New Year’s Day and need a new job,” Wieden + Kennedy creative director Mark Fitzloff said. The company ran a Super Bowl ad this year and a flight of TV and print ads followed during Q1. Then the agency created and produced a viral video campaign that launched March 18, with two long form animated films running at YouTube that take a humorous approach to the job hunting dilemma.
In “Assessing Your Workplace Worth,” viewers are asked to consider how their last birthday was celebrated at work. The film presents the birthday celebration as a gauge of the viewer’s job status, before suggesting that “a job with a chocolate fountain birthday party is out there and yours for the taking,” if you use CareerBuilder.com.
“Taking the office birthday as a lesson to judge yourself stays in line with the overall campaign, which stresses CareerBuilder.com as a knowing friend that makes you face the music, look in the mirror and say it’s time to find a new job,” Fitzloff said. “Office humor has been mined quite a bit through The Office and other TV shows, so it was a challenge to find new truths and explore them, like the office birthday,” he said.
The film follows the theme of the general campaign, “with the experienced tone of voice of the narrator who’s been in that office before,” Fitzloff said. “And it’s tied together graphically with the use of blue and white and the tag lines that build the overall message with the little truths about what it’s really like to work in an office.”
The tag line that appears at the beginning of the film is the initials CBBCOS that appears next to the words they stand for: “Career Builder Birthday Celebration Observational System.”
Marcelino Alvarez, executive interactive producer at Wieden + Kennedy, said the animation was built in Flash and After Effects. “The idea was to keep it simple,” he said. “We borrowed from PowerPoint graphics for a business presentation and merged it with the CareerBuilder.com aesthetic, with heavy use of organic blue and the computer illustrations.”
Alvarez said the elements in Flash were hand drawn. “We brought them into Flash and recorded the voice over to bring it together and keep it in line with the creative goal. There was no heavy duty animation, it feels consistent.”
Fitzloff said the PowerPoint presentation of charts and graphs was used to “make fun of the corporate America target.”
The film has been viewed over 12,000 times at YouTube since its March 18 launch. It’s also playing at Revver. But it doesn’t play at CareerBuilder.com.
“Assessing Your Workplace Worth” runs three minutes two seconds. “We wanted to explore the issue as much as we could and the demographic has a lot of time,” Fitzloff said. “If they’re bored at their job, it gives them something to chew on.” When asked whether he thinks the film will be viewed at work or home, he said, “9:30 on Monday morning. They can watch it at work and post their resumes. We want people to enjoy it, but the idea is to get them to act.”
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