LinkedIn believes in you! Yes, you!
LinkedIn Will Air Its First-Ever TV Commercial During the Oscars
You can be an astronaut, says LinkedIn.
LinkedIn
That’s the takeaway from the company’s new — and first-ever — television commercial set to air Sunday night during ABC’s broadcast of the Academy Awards. The 30-second spot features an astronaut floating through space — a popular aspirational job in American culture, says LinkedIn’s marketing VP Nick Bartle — with the tagline, “You’re closer than you think.”
The spot was inspired by a tweet LinkedIn sent out back in December, highlighting a NASA job opening for an “Astronaut Candidate.” LinkedIn claimed that roughly three million U.S. LinkedIn users qualified for the job based on their profiles. It was the company’s most popular tweet ever.
https://twitter.com/LinkedIn/status/676367298454822912
So they decided to turn it into a TV commercial and blast it to the masses.
“The astronaut is a universal symbol for the dream job,” explained Bartle, who joined the company from Apple last fall. “We want to show people the tools we’ve got that will enable them to take a step closer to their own personal moonshot.”
The spot is part of a larger campaign the company has planned, which includes running the ad on TV over the few weeks after the Oscars. Bartle says it isn’t necessarily about getting more users or increasing engagement (though that would no doubt be cool with LinkedIn). It’s more about setting the record straight on what LinkedIn actually is.
“There are labels that kick around. There’s ‘the Facebook for professionals.’ ‘The online Rolodex.’ ‘The place to post your resume,’” Bartle explained. “In every instance we feel we’re not just those things, we’re so much more than that.”
Like, a place to land your dream job, apparently.
Fun fact: The man doing the voiceover for the commercial is actually LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. The company also got all the footage for the commercial directly from NASA. “It was quite possibly the lowest production [cost] I’ve ever done,” joked Bartle.
Here’s the ad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_cz6Xt-SZM&feature=youtu.be
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
