Dice: Bringing humor to an unfunny business by Michael Baumert
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Michael Baumert is the Head of Design for Dice, the leading career site for tech professionals. He is responsible for the overall look and feel of the company site, products and marketing which includes overseeing advertising work. Prior to joining Dice in 2014 Michael has run design groups for a number of consumer-facing technology companies as well as a creative agency.
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Dice: Bringing humor to an unfunny business by Michael Baumert
- 1. Bringing Humor to an Unfunny Business
- 3. We Needed to Make An Impact
- 4. Advertising in this business is by the numbers.
- 6. The Concept
- 9. We learned a lot.
- 10. Here’s some new stuff.
- 14. What we learned • Don’t be afraid of controversy. • Go all in. • Act as if your ad budget is your last dollar. • If it works – keep it going, if it doesn’t scrap it.
- 15. Thanks.
Notes de l'éditeur
- Introduction
- So first let me set up the situation – recruiting, job hunting and all the surrounding businesses are about as far from funny as you can be. -- If you’re a decent developer in silicon valley – you’re probably already employed.. In fact you’re probably getting free sushi for lunch and you get chauffeured to work every day in a wifi-enabled, air conditioned luxury bus. You may also be getting pestered by recruiters trying to lure you away with promises of even better sushi and faster luxury bus wifi. The thing that sucks about this if you’re a developer isn’t that you’re being bothered necessarily – although it can be annoying – it’s that maybe there is a better opportunity out there.. Maybe you should jump ship.. Most developers aren’t the best at managing their careers - they don’t always see themselves as a hot commodity and often times they’ve got a non-traditional education and work history. -- On the other side of the phone, there’s the recruiter.. These guys are often times in a boiler room setting competing with each other and trying as hard as they can just to get someone to actually talk to them on the other end of the phone. They’re basically treasure hunting.. Or maybe big-game hunting.. They even have a term called “purple squirrel”. So finding an awesome Full Stack developer who’s willing to drop what they’re doing and come write code for you is like finding a purple squirrel in the park – next to impossible. This is honestly about as clever as they get. All in all, the whole business of tech recruiting and career management is kind of a drag.. Not funny.
- So given the realities of the business, we needed to make an impact.. And to do that we needed to bring some humor, and maybe a little controversy.
- So First off, let’s have a look at what advertising looks like in this industry.. It’s almost all text with big bold statements and a lot of numbers..
- You know.. Find 350,000 tech pros.. Or we’ve got 500 Java developer jobs right here! That kind of thing.. The numbers are usually questionable and even if they were right, it’s really not that interesting. We were guilty of this too. So we thought that it would be kind of fun to try something different..
- So here’s the concept.. Let’s hire a real fashion photographer, get a studio and do something like this.. -- Only instead of a piping hot David Beckham.. Let’s take real developers -- and put them in their boxer briefs and call them the hottest in tech. So obviously this concept was a tough sell. I think I was called crazy more thana couple of time.. And My wife did catch me going over some of the sample shots one evening which was weird. So we started in stealth mode. In order to get things rolling, we sort of acted like we were going to keep running the existing ads.. And then we got a budget together, went to new york and this happened.
- ..and the thing is, these guys all had a great time. They were actually having a spirited debate about the merits of PHP during the shoot while they were wearing those white terrycloth robes and were being fussed over by hair and makeup.. It was kind of surreal.
- So we ran a pretty successful campaign.. We won an award and pissed off one of our competitors on twitter which was funny. But it didn’t start that way.
- So in general, It was tough to get this concept off the ground. Our leadership was definitely skeptical and more than a few times I got some weird looks while paging through hundreds.. Well thousands honestly.. Of pictures of guys in their underwear. Ultimately the way we sold it is to only run 2 boards initially in San Francisco as a test.. And we kept running the other ads just to be safe.. But here’s the thing – while it’s definitely not high art, and similar ideas have been done before – it’s kinda funny because if you work in high tech you know these guys.. And in, general we know what it’s like to be hounded by recruiters.. And it worked.. all of a sudden we started hearing from people.. “Hey I really like those ads”. Weirdly enough it was a conversation starter in some cases.. And for a billboard campaign, that’s huge – usually people see billboards as somewhere between an annoyance and eye pollution, but we might have just cracked a few smiles. So finally the management team was convinced and this is now the only campaign that we run. So we’re continuing the campaign – we’ve got a whole new batch of tech pros – even a couple of women this time and we’re hoping to add just a little bit more humor into a pretty humor-less enterprise. Thanks, and here’s a few shots of some upcoming boards.
- So in general, It was tough to get this concept off the ground. Our leadership was definitely skeptical and I’m actually shocked that we pulled the trigger.. But here’s the thing – while it’s definitely not high art, and similar ideas have been done before – it’s kinda funny because if you work in high tech you know these guys.. And in, general we know what it’s like to be hounded by recruiters.. Or maybe to be a recruiter chasing after their purple squirrel. And it worked.. all of a sudden we started hearing from people.. “Hey I really like those ads”. Weirdly enough it was a conversation starter in some cases.. And for a billboard campaign, that’s huge – usually people see billboards as somewhere between an annoyance and eye pollution, but we might have just cracked a few smiles. So we’re continuing the campaign – we’ve got a whole new batch of tech pros – even a couple of women this time and we’re hoping to add just a little bit more humor into a pretty humor-less enterprise. Thanks, and here’s a few shots of some upcoming boards.