Hasta La Creative!

The new campaign from Monster.com confuses me. It’s subtly, almost subversively anti-work. One spot shows people using various “weapons” (umbrellas, satellite dishes) to hold back Monday morning and the start of the workweek. Of course, only people with jobs have such fears. Another iteration focuses on tedious commutes, with workers gliding passively through cities en route to their cubes. Hello! Only people with jobs end up with the same mind-numbing commutes every day. Then there’s the tagline: “Your calling is calling.” When does your “calling” call you at home, at night and on weekends? When you have a job, that’s when. Monster gets people jobs, which land them on 6 a.m. trains with their cell phones buzzing and eight-plus hours of work still to come. It facilitates the scenarios it claims to destroy. I guess that’s why they call it Monster. (Maybe I’m projecting. I got my annual performance review from AdFreak today. They called my posts “cranky” and “disturbing.” I was aiming for “phlegmatic” and “surreal.” I’ll have to work a little harder this year.)

—Posted by David Gianatasio