Taking a kid to work is a noble undertaking; it might inspire a youngster to think about his or her own future career possibilities. But as a new Monster.com spot demonstrates, doing so could be hazardous to your own job, or at least to your stress level.
The :30, "Shadow Day," promoted job search Web site Monster.com’s sponsorship of Job Shadow Day on Feb. 2. The ad was created by Wenham, Mass.-based agency Mullen and was co-directed by Rick LeMoine and Steve Miller (a.k.a. LeMoine/Miller) of bicoastal/international @radical.media.
The spot opens in a hospital during rounds, as a doctor looks at a patient’s medical chart, upon which the words "looks bad" appear in a childish scrawl. A crude drawing of a very sick man accompanies the health assessment. The stunned doctor asks who wrote up the chart. Cut to a shot of the young resident standing near his young son, who is also dressed in scrubs. Although it’s obvious who wrote the chart, the boy looks at his dad as if to pin the blame on him, and the father’s horrified expression is priceless. Cut to a super: "This February, share your job with a kid."
The next vignette is set in a cable installation van, where a man and his son sit amid huge spools of cable wire. "What’d you do before this?" the son asks. The father leans back to ponder the question and responds, "Oh, what did any of us do before cable?", producing an affirmative "Yep" from his progeny.
Another set-up follows, this time at a meeting-in-progress at a corporate boardroom. The camera pans down the table and comes to rest on a little girl who’s dressed professionally and wears serious-looking glasses. "These figures do not add up," she says.
The resident and his son reappear in the next segment, in what is perhaps the spot’s funniest bit. The resident, wearing his stethoscope, writes on a chart, while his fascinated son speaks softly into the mouthpiece: "Can you hear me now?" Dad says, "Yes." "Can you hear me now?" "Yes." After a few more iterations, the now-annoyed resident says firmly, "Yes, I can hear you."
Another super informs us that Monster.com is the proud sponsor of Job Shadow Day. A voiceover says, "Log on to Monster.com now, and learn how to help a kid’s career before it even starts." The spot’s final kicker is a brief shot of a little girl in an elevator who, noticing one man, tosses out the comment, "Hmm—half day, Bob?"
Mullen executive creative director Edward Boches related that after "months and months" of working on Monster.com’s Super Bowl spot "Road Not Taken," the client informed the agency—four weeks before the Big Game—that it wanted another spot, which would air during the pre-game broadcast.
"A couple of guys came up with the idea of trying to humorously show the idea of kids shadowing people at work," said Boches. "The core idea was to have these kids feel like they were already in enough command of their environment, so that the takeaway was, ‘Let a kid follow you for the day, but watch out—they catch on quick.’"
LeMoine/Miller shot the spot in one day on location in Patterson, N.J., where most of the set-ups were completed at Barnert Hospital. According to Miller, it was the incongruity of the kids in the adult world that attracted them to the spot. "We always see kids acting like adults in the adult world, because that’s what’s seen as cute and funny," said Miller. "But it’s funnier to see what happens when a kid really acts like a kid, and make it real." For instance, "Hmm—half day, Bob?" was a line the directors came up with spontaneously, because they wanted to get in a little piece of "office-speak."
There was a good deal of ad-libbing on the set, which included the "Can you hear me now?" exchange, which the directors cited as being their favorite part of the spot. Said LeMoine, "It’s one of those moments where you happen to catch a kid being a kid." Miller added, "We love to cover what the creatives have in their original script, and then just riff on that a little bit."
