Aired during the 1999 Superbowl was this ad from monster.com, one of the many new internet firms rushing to establish a brand name identity for itself even before most people know what its product or service is. Like the rest of its nascent dot.com brethren, this ad hails a jaded, and apparently media-savvy post-genX audience. Oh, and what is the product? We, "there's a better job out there"...

This ad is a cunningly cynical play (take-off) on a well-recognized Nike commercial from 1996 entitled "If you let me play." The Nike ad was striking because of the way that it had children speaking in the words of adults to express a theme of empowerment of girls through athletics. The monster.com steals from the Nike ad in both the visual format and style as well as the serial arrangement of how each of child is sequenced as finishing the sentence or phrase that preceded them. As in the Nike ad, there is a relative absence of affect in the voices of the children as they speak their lines.

But in the monster.com ad, the ostensible theme is not empowerment, but an expression of alienated youth as workers to be, children who view their future of work as being alienated, exploited and abused by employers. The twist here is that they speak about welcoming a future of being underpaid, unappreciated, uncreative and insecure. They don't dread it, they welcome it. Or that, at least, is what their words say.

"When I grow up I want to file, all day..."		"I wanna claw my way up to middle management..."
"be replaced on a whim..."		"I wanna have a brown nose..."
"I wanna be a yes-man..."		"Yes-woman..."
"Yes sir, coming sir...."		"Anything for a raise sir"...
"When I grow up..."		"When I grow up..."
"I wanna be under-appreciated ..."		"be paid less for doing the same job..."
"I wanna be forced into early retirement."		what do you want to be?

Only at the end of this sequence of soundbites does a title card appear with the question "what did you want to be?" At this point, viewers may realize that the narrative just viewed is actually an invitation to the services of monster.com -- to wit, "there's a better job out there"... and with their services you might find it.