Down with Monkeys, Up with Ads That No One Likes!

Update: Upon further review, it was the same agency that did both the monkey spots and the new ones. In either case, the agency was fired after the new ads performed dismally. Bring back the monkeys!

I really liked the old CareerBuilder ads where a guy works in an office surrounded by monkeys. For one thing, I really like monkeys -- they just seem really funny. For another, the ads really drove the point across: If you hate your job, visit CareerBuilder to find another one (I make no claims about the efficacy of these statements). The ads also tied in nicely with some other marketing campaigns CB ran on both the recruiter (they had live monkeys at the big SHRM conference one year) and the job seeker side (the thing you could do where you made the monkey say something and then you could send it to your friend was pretty strong viral marketing).

Anyway, people were pretty surprised when CareerBuilder decided to drop the monkeys and go with people running through the jungle (corporate jungle I suppose). The new ads, pretty predictably, bombed.

Turns out, the decision to drop the monkeys was based on a straw poll in USA Today. Now that's what we call market research!

Here's some online scuttlebutt about the decision. As you might expect, the CEO of CB's old advertising agency went pretty ballistic.

Scuttlebutt #1

Scuttlebutt #2

Scuttlebutt #3

Scuttlebutt #4

Well played CareerBuilder.

Here's my favorite of the *old* ads. Two parts of this really get me:

1) The part where the human is showing sales figures on a chart and the monkey tell him to flip it around, instantly creating sales growth!

2) The part where the monkey is lighting his cigar with a $100 bill.