Lorem Recruitment

Background

Jung von Matt is one of the most creative agencies in the world. It was the No.4 agency in the world for creativity and the No.1 agency in Germany in The Directory Big Won rankings for both 2011 and 2010.

To keep creative people interested in a job at the agency, they have run a series of campaigns to reach art directors in unusual ways.

This latest idea to sneak a recruitment ad in under the noses of rival agency bosses was to hide a job advertisement in their art directors’ very own layouts.

Idea

When they are designing their layouts, most art directors go to lipsum.com to cut and paste dummy text, ipsum lorem, into their layouts. 50,000 creatives visit the site each week. The idea, then, was to place recruitment copy in the dummy text, reading: 'Do your layouts deserve better than lorem ipsum? Apply as an art director and team up with the best copywriters at Jung von Matt."

The way it worked is that once the text was saved to your clipboard, it then changed to the recruitment copy. In other words, art directors were amazed to see they were pasting a completely different text to the one they had copied.

Results

So far, over 130,000 users have cut and pasted the ad into their layouts – almost all of them creative talents who match the job description. Many creatives talked about the hidden ad on Twitter, Facebook and in blogs, leading to editorial pieces in leading advertising and marketing magazines around the world, which helped to spread the message. Incidentally, if you’re an art director looking for a new challenge, go to: http://www.jvm.com/en/jobs/lipsum/

Our Thoughts

This is as much about maintaining a brand image as it is about recruitment. JvM has run a whole series of clever little pieces, ostensibly to hire top talent but also designed to win awards and keep reminding the industry that they are some of the sharpest tools in the box. I loved the QR code idea (see p.xx) but this is equally nifty.

Imagine it, late at night, working on a layout, discovering that the nonsense Latin you cut from the website has suddenly rearranged itself into readable copy.

Of course, what may end up happening is that the ads become too damn clever, so art directors may not apply, assuming that are not good enough for JvM.