'Find Something New' Campaign Doesn't Feel As Motivational As They Think It Does
No one is unaware that the current public health crisis has plunged the U.S. economy into a state that's hard to describe without swearing. The widespread temporary closure of businesses has pushed the unemployment rate to levels not seen since around the time we (officially) started writing them down, and that's a fairly huge deal. We don't know how to fix that because we're not economists, but we feel pretty confident the answer isn't cheerfully reminding the unemployed that schools technically exist and checking it off your to-do list.
To us, that's what Ivanka Trump's "Find Something New" campaign feels like it does. It was apparently in the works before the crisis hit but "gained new urgency" in its aftermath, although what it didn't gain was any revisions to reflect the reality of why so many people are suddenly unemployed in the first place. In the 30-second ad, a quartet of optimally diverse smiling faces assures viewers that they, too, were once shiftless layabouts and suggest hilariously unfeasible pathways out of such a fate. "Find an apprenticeship!" orders one former fitness instructor turned welder living in a world where master craftsmen are begging to work in close proximity to new strangers. "I found a medical course online," insists a young woman in scrubs before pricking a patient with a needle, having presumably only practiced on Scrub Daddies and other household objects.
It's true that a huge number of jobs might not be coming back once the dust settles, and those people are going to need support when the time comes. What they don't need is anyone telling them, "It sucks that a deadly pandemic cost you your job. Have you considered going into a field that would expose you to all the sick people?" Nevermind the fact that the people who would teach them may also out of a job right now. It's just a lot easier to put the onus of fixing the economy on the jobless than actually doing the work to make the country safe for business again.
Manna also hates working, which is why she has a Twitter.
Top image: Ad Council
