The World's Toughest Job Ad

Overview

The World’s Toughest Job Commercial is a video advertisement for the international greeting card manufacturer American Greeting featuring a series of mock job interviews for the position of director of operation at Rehtom Inc., which is eventually revealed to be an elaborate prank staged in homage to motherhood. Upon its release in April 2014, the advertisement sparked an online debate surrounding the perception of mothers in the media and emotionally manipulative marketing stunts.

Background

On April 14th, 2014, American Greeting’s CardStore YouTube channel^[1] uploaded a commercial produced by the advertising company Mullen^[2] titled “World’s Toughest Job – #worldstoughestjob,” in which they explain they placed a fake ad for a position online and in newspapers, and invited candidates to interview for the position through video conferencing. The interviewer explained the position’s duties and lack of salary, and when the candidates balked at the long list of duties they would have to perform for free, the interviewer pointed out mothers already performed them for free. Within 72 hours, the video gained over 10.4 million views.

Notable Developments

Online Reactions

Within 72 hours of the videos release, the Twitter hashtag included within the video’s title, #worldstoughestjob^[3], was tweeted out over 17,000 times. The video itself gained over 7,000 YouTube comments within the same time period. On April 16th, Redditor pixelpants posted a link to the Salon article and began a discussion about what the ad means about perceptions of motherhood on the subreddit /r/childfree/^[8]. In less than 24 hours the thread had gained over 500 upvotes and over 100 comments.

News Media Coverage

In the next several days, articles about the ad and its virality were published on several news sites, including CNN^[5], TIME^[6] and USA Today,^[7] as well as commentaries and editorials on the qualification of the mother being the world’s toughest job.

Commentaries

On April 15th, Salon^[4] published a post titled “Motherhood isn’t the ‘world’s toughest job’,” in which the author, a mother herself, explains not only are there many more jobs more grueling than motherhood, being a mother is hard work, but not a job. The next day, TIME^[9] published an article titled “Here’s What’s Wrong With That Viral “World’s Toughest Job” Ad,” which accused the ad of “fetishizing” the work of mothers at their expense and the expense of stay-at-home fathers. That same day, Policy Mic^[10] published an article titled “Why That Viral ’World’s Toughest Job’ Video Actually Undermines Women,” which argues that the ad makes it seem like “motherhood is the be-all, end-all for women.”