Epica d'Or 2006 (press)

The 2006 print Epica d’Or was won by Scholz & Friends, Berlin, for their ‘Wrong Working Environment’ campaign, created for Jobsintown.de

Jobsintown.de is an internet-based service for job seekers and a major player in online recruitment. The challenge for its agency Scholz & Friends was to raise brand awareness among the target group while being restricted by a small media budget.

The agency decided to promote jobsintown.de as the best way of getting a new job when you just can’t take any more of your current one!

In order to do this, awful working conditions were evoked with a series of trompe l’oeil posters on the sides of ATMs, vending machines and photo booths. The pictures made it look as though real people were toiling away in the cramped innards of the machines. The images were designed to generate a ‘That’s exactly how I feel!’ response in the target group.

For instance, the poster on the side of an ATM cash distributor shows a young man in a miniscule office, painstakingly counting banknotes as he feeds them through the slot. Above his head is a tiny shelf holding office equipment, while the cash box sits on his desk. His coffee cup is perched precariously on a couple of folders.

The photo booth version features a guy working in a miniature dark room, laboriously drying each photo with a hairdryer.

Finally, a sad blond woman works ‘inside’ a coffee vending machine, trying to prepare beverages in a space not much larger than a filing cabinet.

Below each of the scenes is the tagline: ‘Life is too short for the wrong job’.

To achieve maximum impact, the agency chose vending machines located in and around high-traffic metro stations. In other words, commuters would see the posters on the way to and from their detested jobs.

To support the campaign, the agency developed city light posters, distributed promotional flyers and produced radio spots. A guerrilla marketing campaign using business cards was also developed.

‘The Wrong Working Environment’ campaign won the 2006 Epica d’Or for print advertising in a final vote against ‘Mother’s Day’ and an Amnesty International campaign, both by the Swiss agency Walker.

This marked the first time that Scholz & Friends has won an Epica d’Or – and indeed the first time one of Epica’s top awards has gone to a German agency.

Jobs in Machines

Jan Burney reports on ‘wrong working environments’

How do you capture the attention of people engrossed in misery, on their way to a job they detest and unlikely to give a second glance to all the shiny, happy people in adverts that only emphasise the contrast with their own tedious working lives? That was the challenge facing Jan Leube and Matthias Spaetgens, the creative team from Scholz & Friends Berlin, who were handed the brief for a new campaign by Jobsintown, an online recruitment service. The company wanted to become a serious challenger to it’s more established rivals - but on a media budget that was considerably smaller.

Leube and Spaetgens convinced their client that only something very special and out of the ordinary would succeed in attracting enough notice and began looking at alternative media as a way round their small budget. Travelling to and from work, and armed with the knowledge that 87% of German employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, they hit on the idea of targeting people when they were most conscious of their discontent - commuting to the work they despised. To grab their attention, they would use these mundane features of our everyday environment - vending machines - and shock people into givng them a second look.

Leube and Spaetgens’ series of trompe ‘oeil posters plastered to the sides of ATMs, photo booths and vending machines showed people apparently toiling at repetitive tasks - counting and distributing banknotes, developing passport photos, preparing endless cups of coffee - within the tiny, confined space of the cramped booths. Clearly, many of the commuters who thought, "Yeah, that’s me," were inspired to act by Jobsintown’s message on the posters ("Life’s too short for the wrong job"): visits to their website increased by 20% on the previous year.

By choosing booths located in and around metro stations with the highest commuter traffic, the agency maximised the effectiveness of the campaign. Initially, however, they needed all their powers of persuasion to convince these media partners, since the machines had never been used for advertising before.

Ultimately, though, it was the frustrated workers in their claustrophobic booths that not only created an increase in brand awareness for Leube and Spaetgens’ client but also persuaded huge numbers of German employees to take action against their own discontent. As a result, the Jobsintown posters might not be the only thing putting a smile on their face as they travel to work: a change of job could be making them feel more like the happy people in the ordinary ads and less like the poor wage slaves who provoked them into contacting Jobsintown.

Jan Burney is a writer and lecturer in applied creativity and art history. She has worked as contributing editor to leading advertising industry titles including Lürzer’s Archive, Creativity and Graphis, was the editor of Designer magazine, and is the author of books including an acclaimed biography of the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass.