So Monster ‘Bored’ has partnered with another newspaper. In light of CareerBuilder’s long standing relationship with print and Yahoo!’s recent move, the Big Three and the nation’s newspapers are looking a lot like a night out with Britney, Lindsay and Paris. Party!
And much like a night out with the “Brit Pack,” there could be a major hangover come morning. Bummer!
My first dotcom job came with the since defunct E.span in 1997. We were closely aligned with NAS, a recruitment advertising agency still alive and kicking today. Why? We were both owned by the same group of investors.
It seemed like a match made in heaven: The grown-up agency, deeply entrenched with newspapers and other offline mediums, married to the dotcom upstart, full of promise. Each company would leverage the other’s past, present and future to create a successful solution for employers all over the world. We’re gonna be rich!
(Cue ominous, storm-is-brewing soundtrack.)
As good as it looked on paper, the two were an absolute odd couple. NAS sales reps didn’t want to sell online ads, where commissions were a joke in comparison to print. E.span had no interest in pushing an old medium like print and the other services NAS offered. We didn’t “get” each other. We didn’t care to.
And when E.span changed its brand to JobOptions and built a network of partners including newspapers, radio stations and the like, the result wasn’t much different. It was the Origin of Brands in full effect, I suppose. A car can’t be a boat.
So it’s back to the future. Can offline and online come together, as Monster Worldwide and Yahoo! HotJobs seem to be betting their cards, along with so many of the nation’s newspapers? Time will tell.
From my own past, however, I see disaster and tremendous desperation in such moves. But what do I know? I mean, Britney and K-Fed worked out, right? What! They didn’t? Damn.
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December 27th, 2006 at 8:54 am
It’s all in the execution.
While E.span and NAS’ partnership didn’t work out well and Bernard Hodes Advertising was unable to use their sales force to effectively sell CareerMosaic to their customers, TMP was able to leverage their account execs, recruitment advertising relationships, and intense focus on sales to turn Monster.com into a worldwide brand and a billion dollar business.
Even though they had many newspaper relationships at the time, CareerPath.com was unable to make their business work. After that company was acquired by CareerBuilder (and even after losing some of those newspaper relationships in the process) they today form the basis for the business that by most metrics is in the process of eclipsing Monster.
Same strategy, different results.