Words on the roof
of a bus: 'Don't jump'
Classic campaign from 1999 for Careerbuilder.com
By Toni Fitzgerald
Jun 9, 2009
Alternative media is hot these days, making its way
onto more and more media plans. But actually agencies have been using
alternative media for years.
Some of the classics still stand out for their cleverness.
Here's one particularly relevant oldie.
Imagine a fed-up office drone, sitting in his 20th-floor cubicle,
hating his job, worrying about the mounting layoffs and wondering when
he might get the boot.
Our drone ponders taking a swan dive out the window.
Looking down, he sees the street below and a bus passing by.
On the roof of the bus he sees, in huge bold letters, these words: “don’t jump.”
In smaller letters, below and to the right, he sees "careerbuilder.com."
The year was 1999, in the early days of the dot.com boom, and the
then-fledgling careerbuilder.com was looking to steal attention away
from Monster.com.
“It was a classic case of media driving the idea – here’s the space,
now let’s write to the space,” says Joe Alexander, now senior vice
president and creative director at the Martin Agency in Richmond, Va.,
who was a copywriter on the 1999 campaign.
“Who’d be looking at the top of a bus? Someone who has a crappy job, who hates their boss. What would they be thinking about?”
If a bit edgy, pushing at the borders of taste, the message was sure to
illicit a laugh and draw attention to a brand that needed to
distinguish itself in a relatively new field, online job search.
It worked.
Alexander says the agency bought space on a couple of New York City bus
tops, running the ad for about a month. The campaign was such a hit,
drawing international media attention, that the agency then snapped
photos of the bus tops and turned it into a print campaign.
“It created a lot of buzz. I think now, with all the media outlets, all
the blogs, we would really have a heyday,” Alexander says. “This one
has the timeless element, and it’s kind of got that subversiveness to
it.”
In fact, the ad has remained popular ever since, popping up on
advertising blogs to this day as an example of an outdoor campaign with
just the right amount of bite.
“It has a resonance,” Alexander says. “Maybe it’s something that, with
the current environment, makes it more relevant than it ever was.”
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