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Careerbuilder |
Who is CareerBuilder anyway?
CareerBuilder.com is the nation's largest online job site with more than 23 million unique visitors per month and over 1.9 million jobs listed. Owned by Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI), Tribune Company (NYSE:TRB), and The McClatchy Company (NYSE:MNI), the company offers a vast online and print network to help job seekers connect with employers. Millions of job seekers visit the site every month to search for opportunities by industry, location, company and job type, sign up for automatic email job alerts, and get advice on job hunting and career management.
Long-term objectives demand a creative solution…
The objectives for CareerBuilder.com creativity are simple. One, make the brand famous; two, continue to solidify CareerBuilder.com's leadership of the online job search category.
From a strategic level, CareerBuilder and their marketing agency of record, Cramer Krasselt (C-K), sought to place the brand smack in the center of the emotional driver of the category: job dissatisfaction. CareerBuilder is the brand that asks you to confront your dissatisfaction and do something about it by visiting the online site with more jobs than any other: CareerBuilder.com.
In a bit of symbolic fun, much of the CareerBuilder work revolves around the idea of bringing to literal life that famous, figurative grumble of the disgruntled, "I work with a bunch of monkeys."
Knowing that today's consumers often choose to opt-out of marketing messages, CareerBuilder sought to develop multiple communications pieces in order to provide consumers with multiple ways to opt into the brand's key messages.
So after developing television, print, out of home and PR programs, Cramer Krasselt and CareerBuilder began developing an online extension of the campaign with the goal of aggressively engaging consumers in the online environment where the CareerBuilder brand lives.
Hitting all the buttons.
The goal of the online extension was three-fold: 1) Allow consumers the ability to truly interact with the brand, 2) Create a program that is organically viral, requiring no marketing support, 3) Build buzz for the brand.
And when it came to engaging people online, giving them a chance to play with the CareerBuilder brand seemed like the right thing to do.
After looking at dozens of ideas, one rose to the top. It directly supported the strategy, featured the monkeys, was highly involving and entertaining for consumers, and perhaps most importantly, it was organically viral - the more you sent it to friends and posted it on your blog, the more you would get back.
Monk-e-Mail was born.
Monk-e-Mail sends emails in the form of talking chimps - chimps that users are able to dress, fully accessorize and then make speak - using either a pre-recorded message or their own customized messages recorded via text-to-speech technology or by calling a toll-free number.
Monk-e-Mail works because it takes one of our most common activities, email, and makes it feel new and surprising again. It's easy to use. And it offers just the right amount of personalization.
Why Oddcast and VHost-driven animation?
To bring Monk-e-Mail to life, Cramer-Krasselt needed a partner who could execute the idea in a fun, innovative, interactive and highly engaging way. The execution of the idea would determine its success and C-K needed a world class partner.
After seeing their portfolio of work, C-K turned to Oddcast, a User Generated Media technology provider. The C-K team immediately knew that the VHost™ Workshop and Oddcast's experience would help to bring the concept to life, allowing it to reach its true potential.
Using Oddcast's VHost™ Workshop avatar technology, CareerBuilder's talking monkeys came alive - allowing consumers to interact in their own personal way with the CareerBuilder brand.
And because ease-of-use is critical to the success of viral marketing programs, a mandate for simplicity drove the development. It was crucial that the site load quickly and require little instruction to function. And though the ability to personalize was important, it was also critical that the customization not overwhelm users and slow down the experience.
With that, the entire user experience happens above the fold and the application itself is contained on one single page, minimizing the chance that consumers will get lost or give up along the way.
And then there's the Monk-e-Mail monkeys themselves.
"When you can make monkeys say what you want it's going to be funny, "said Marshall Ross, Chief Creative Officer at Cramer-Krasselt. "When those talking monkeys are created by mismatched stills and kind of weirdly float around and move their eyes, it's funnier. But when you can play with their voices, even use your own, dress the monkeys as you want, give them x-ray glasses, Elvis hair, and eye shadow, well, now you're in big, fat, monkey fun."
Did it work?
Did it ever!
Without costly TV tags or banner campaigns — in fact without a single marketing dollar spent to support it — Monk-e-Mail has become one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns of all time. The numbers tell the story:
AdAge calls Monk-e-Mail "history's third-greatest human achievement, after only democracy and Velcro." It's spread to dozens of countries. And it has hundreds of blog entries devoted to it.
It also paid for itself in the first week:
"We had a stubborn prospect that we just couldn't get a meeting with," recalled Richard Castellini, Vice President of Consumer Marketing for CareerBuilder.com. "One of our salespeople sent the prospect a Monk-e-Mail, and days later we had landed that elusive first meeting and the potential for a new account. The power of Monk-e-Mail was its ability to not only get consumers talking about CareerBuilder, but to get employers, revenue generators for our company, taking notice, too."
CareerBuilder continues to widen its lead in the online job search category, and Monk-e-Mail continues to see a half-million additional sessions each week. Together, CareerBuilder, Oddcast and Cramer-Krasselt have created a true internet phenomenon, helping CareerBuilder achieve its business goals.
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