There's a giant company in my closet

Monster.com's current ad campaign features job hunters describing their skills and what they can offer to employers. The TV ads are a mix of folksiness and oatmeal container slogans. "Hi, I'm Bud. I have 23 years experience in systems engineering and analysis. If you want something done, I'll do it right. The way it should be done."

The tagline is, "There are thousands of candidates just like Bud on Monster.com," which is good, because this Bud doesn't come in a six-pack. But the message distracts from the real point. If your job web site has to resort to promoting unemployed people in a national television campaign to find them work, then either you need to expand the search engine categories from "easy work," "hard work," and "work it like a Polaroid", or the economy is doing much worse than any of us have thought.

The first time I saw this commercial, I expected it to end with "I'm John Kerry and I approved of this ad." A few tweaks and it becomes a diatribe against President Bush.

"Hi, I'm Bud. Thanks to George Bush, I have to appear in 1.2 million homes five times a week to even hope of tasting once again the sweet nectar of a full-time job. I can barely afford to feed my children. Bud Light is starving and last week, my daughter, Bud Dry, went to the hospital for dehydration. I can’t even afford the drugs she needs in America. If it weren't for our friends, the Molson's, we'd be on the street, lying in a gutter somewhere."