Tag Archives: indeed

Science, creativity, and contradiction: the making of a modern TV ad

3 Oct Indeed TV Ad

In this age of ubiquitous technology, it should be quick and easy to create a 30-second TV advertisement. How complex can it be? The answer: shockingly hard if you do it right. To get TV advertising right requires a near impossible mix of science and creativity – disciplines that are in many ways diametrically opposed. It requires small teams that protect the purity of great ideas and big audiences that provide the feedback required to avoid mistakes. Great ads requires creative ideas that strike the most personal human chords with an appeal that spans cultures and continents.

Among all of these contradictions, the core challenge of advertising is that you are delivering a message that nobody is looking to hear. When it comes to both TV and online video, the ads are the price of the programming and the competition is steep — in the U.S. the average person is exposed to more than 5,000 brands and ads every day.

And many companies are organized to systematically dilute the power of great ideas. Creative advertising requires powerful ideas, emotion, and beautiful execution. Science requires the sort of measurement and optimization that slowly erodes the punch out of many creative endeavors. Keeping performance and creative impact in balance is difficult. Too many powerfully creative ideas are weakened by endless rounds of negotiation, revision, and compromise.

Embracing these challenges, today our team at Indeed launched the first ad in our latest global TV campaign. The ad, titled “what / where” in reference to the highlighted Indeed search boxes that are featured throughout, will begin airing today in the United States. Additional versions will start to appear in 6 other countries over the next few weeks.

This is my favorite Indeed ad yet — for me it strikes the right balance between emotion, inspiration, and performance. Like many strong ads, the final version is very similar to the first concept. We’ve  worked hard to make sure that our tweaks didn’t erode the power of the creative idea.

While the creative idea was the starting point, we had four practical things we wanted to accomplish with this ad:

  1. Performance: Indeed’s mission is to help people get jobs. After family and health, career may be the most important dimension in our lives. We know that if someone hasn’t heard of Indeed, we won’t be able to help them get a job. We advertise to drive awareness and carefully benchmark for each ad the cost per new person aware of Indeed in the labor force.
  2. Salience: We hope people will think about Indeed when they think about looking for a job. We want people to know that we’re the largest job site in the world, that we are a search engine for jobs (not a job board), and that an incredible # of new jobs are added to Indeed every day. We look for ads that build memory structures around these ideas.
  3. Global Relevance: We’re working hard to build Indeed into a global brand. To this end, we look for campaign ideas that get to the heart of human emotion, hopefully transcending culture and geographic boundaries. Practically speaking, we try to design TV ads that can be adapted to work in many markets around the world.
  4. Effective across multiple media channels: We talk about TV but we run adapted versions of our ads on youtube, full episode players like Hulu, other digital video networks, and social networks like facebook. This ad, in particular, was designed to work with or without sound.

And as we developed the ad, we did three interesting things:

  1. Protect the creative idea: By keeping our internal advertising teams small and by ensuring that we have minimal processes for internal review, we try to limit the number of people designing, reviewing, and refining an ad. Our goal is to keep the creative idea as intact as possible as we bring the ad from concept to launch.
  2. Transparent development: In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of transparency as a core marketing value. With this belief, we’ve made our entire advertising development process completely open and transparent within Indeed. Any of our 3,000+ employees can see all of the 500+ ad ideas we’re working at any time. We solicited company-wide feedback on the four most promising concepts prior to the final round of edits. The feedback was phenomenal — it helped is make the ads more relevant to more people around the world.
  3. Pre-launch testing & benchmarking based on emotion: Finally, when we have an ad that we think might meet all these requirements, we test and measure the emotional reactions to the ad in markets around the world. We then benchmark this measured emotional response against a database of ads to model likely performance. Only if it tests better than all of our previous ads will we put it into market.

So that’s it — the difficult process of creating a good global TV ad. And even with all of that work and preparation, we won’t know how many people a new ad can help to find jobs until we release it at scale globally.

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Brand Strategy for a Product Company: the Story of Indeed’s First Global Campaign

11 May

This week we’re rolling out the first global brand campaign for Indeed. It’s a big step for Indeed because we’ve traditionally eschewed these types of investments. We’re not a flashy company. We’re purpose-driven and product-focused. We’re passionately focused on helping people get jobs.

Indeed: How the World Works

“How the World Works” — Indeed’s first global brand campaign

Over the last decade, we’ve been lucky to grow at an amazing rate by helping more and more job seekers find the right job every year. Now, every month, more than 140 million unique users in more than 50 countries visit Indeed. We’re the number one job site in the world as well as the #1 site in the U.S., UK, Canada, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Italy, South Africa, and many other countries. We’re the #1 job app in iOS and Android in more than 20 countries around the world.

So why launch a brand campaign now? It’s a question that we’ve thought about a lot. The online job industry grew up with major job boards in every country, many of which made money by luring job seekers to small pools of paid postings using large TV-driven brand campaigns. Unfortunately, the industry has been dominated by humor-driven ads that mock the workplace and play to employee frustrations.

It’s in this context that Indeed has quietly grown to become the world’s leading job site by focusing on the needs of job seekers. As a search engine, we try to find every job in the world and show them to job seekers on our site — whether or not the employer is an Indeed customer. Today we have more than 16 million jobs on Indeed covering all occupations, roles, and levels. Most of Indeed’s growth derives from the fact that the product is simple, relevant, and comprehensive. We work hard to make the site easy for job seekers to find and use online or with their mobile device.

As we thought about diversifying our strategy to include brand investments, the decision came back to our purpose: helping people find jobs. 140 million people is an enormous amount of job seekers — but it’s a small portion of the world’s 7.2 billion inhabitants. There are still many more jobs offline than online. And there are still many people who don’t know Indeed. It was these factors that encouraged us to develop our first campaign.

In building our first campaign, it was important to tell the story in a way that felt authentic for Indeed, our clients, and job seekers. The campaign’s theme is ‘How the World Works’.  It celebrates the importance of every job, and showcases how Indeed helps millions of job seekers and employers find the right fit.  All of the creative elements within the campaign tell the story of how diverse jobs combine to make something work – from a simple cup of coffee, to the complex workings of the London Underground or the global stock market.

The campaign centerpiece is a television commercial which is a visual representation of the core campaign message. In the ad, the camera quickly turns from the staged advertisement to focus on the workers behind the scenes: the people that come together to make a commercial happen.

Here is the story of how the commercial was made, and what happened when we brought these amazing people together from around the world:

 

To source talent for the commercial, Indeed posted 26 job openings on its website – from accountant, to nurse, to mechanical engineer, to  IT Consultant. It was a great chance for us to showcase what Indeed does best. Within 48 hours, a staggering 1,500 applications were received for the roles.  Indeed then conducted more than 200 interviews in just 14 days resulting in a total cost per hire of $217. Once a selection was made, industry professionals from six different countries – UK, US, Canada, Czech Republic, Australia and Germany – traveled to Prague for filming and production.

While there are many more pieces to the campaign, here is the final commercial which will start showing this week in the United Kingdom, our first brand launch country:

 

As a company, we’ve come to conclusion that both product and brand awareness have an important role in helping people find jobs.  As more people discover our product and as the product continues to evolve, we’ll be able to help more job seekers find the job that is the perfect fit and we’ll be able to help more employers find the right talent for their organization.

Like everything else we do, we’ll be measuring the campaign on many dimensions. One of the most important will be how many new people find a job on Indeed.

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