Mike McKay was looking for a new writer, and he wants someone who can perform under the pressure of 140-character limits. Spectacularly creative writers who can work under serious constraints, like the Old Spice Guy YouTube crew, are hard to find, so he turned to the one place where people live to zing out funny, short responses: Twitter. The funniest Tweet earns a $70,000-a-year job with LA advertising mega-firm Saatchi & Saatchi, regardless of actual qualifications.
“I was like, ‘[F—] it, I’m going to try it,'” McKay explained to The Atlantic. “Immediately I get HR coming up and saying, ‘What did you just do?’ I was thinking, maybe we’ll get idiots and we’ll be stuck: I’ll have to hire one of these guys, but we got great writers.”
The 17 finalists are available for reading and voting on The World’s Shortest-Form Writing Contest’s official website. With the help of the poll, Mike expects to pick the lucky winner by the middle of this week. They’re all pretty funny, and they’re all from experienced ad people and practiced writers (which should be expected since he posted his question on his Twitter account, where he’s known as the executive creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi).
May the best Tweet win!
Tags: Saatchi & Saatchi, Los Angeles, California, Twitter, Twitter used to hire new ad writer, writing job given out via Twitter, funniest Twitter post wins job, Mike McKay, the world’s shortest-form writing contest