'Severance' Makes For An Awkward ZipRecruiter Ad

I recently saw an ad for ZipRecruiter, a job recruiting website, that doubled as an ad for Severance, a mystery-box thriller that satirizes corporate culture. These sorts of ads that use a popular movie or TV show’s content always feel a little forced; they tend to use out-of-context shots or lines and glue the whole thing together with voice-over. It feels like you can see the seams much more clearly like the ad isn’t trying to hide its intentions like many ads are wont to do these days. Choosing Severance, a show about workers struggling under a suffocating corporate leadership, to advertise office worker recruitment is weird and so is the ad itself:

Don’t get me wrong, it’s anodyne enough. It seems like the voiceover is maybe meant to sound like Mr. Milchick and I’m always happy to see more of Severance’s weird world, but like this? Severance is not subtle about its views on the corporate workplace or culture: it’s dehumanizing, dishonest, and manipulative. A series with such a resolutely negative set of beliefs about corporate entities is a super weird choice with which to sell your office recruitment service. This is probably the product of an endorsement deal that allows ZipRecruiter and Apple to promote their respective products together, but as an exceedingly clever friend of mine pointed out, it feels like how that protein drink company named themselves after Soylent Green: why would anyone want the association? Some morbidly fascinated part of me wonders if, in this post-Citizens United verdict world, we’re meant to think ZipRecruiter is somehow cooler as an entity for liking the same show we do.

The cluelessness doesn’t stop there. Apple CEO Tim Cook released this cringe-inducing video recently in which he joins the severed floor of Lumon:

See, America? Despite happily joining the tech baron oligarchy and being the CEO of a corporation that has been sued multiple times for anti-consumer actions, Cook just gets it. He’s cool. He likes Severance , which must mean he shares the anti-corporate sentiment that the show runs on, right? To be fair, American culture is already built on ignoring cognitive dissonance like this, so it’s not too out of the ordinary that this happens. Apple isn’t the first corporation to broadcast media with pro-labor or anti-corporate messaging and it won’t be the last. It can be easy to intuit some kind of larger political leaning in a corporate entity based on its media output. For example, Netflix’s Black Mirror had an episode that was resolutely critical about the use of AI to create content on a Netflix-like streaming platform, but that meant nothing about their continued use of AI to do just that. What we can conclude from this is that a corporation’s output doesn’t reflect its political values.

But do corporations have political values? I would argue that they cultivate the image or the implication of political values more than hold any political belief as an organization. As we see with Apple, it’s a bit of positive marketing to make it seem like the CEO is in on the joke and potentially endears itself to consumers. As much as viewers may find political meaning in series like Severance, corporations see their media as products to be sold and marketed without a relationship to any political value. It’s likely part of why the ZipRecruiter ad came together: from a corporate perspective, there’s no cognitive dissonance to be found because both ZipRecruiter and Severance are about workplaces and any potential political disagreement between the two might as well not exist.

As someone who tends to see politics as values in action, it took me some time to wrap my head around this. With the contraction of the media space, in which there are fewer media producers, this cognitive dissonance has become inescapable. It doesn’t even really matter if anyone realizes this, as long as everyone’s watching anyway. I don’t mean to imply that people should boycott Severance; it’s a great show, separate from whatever evils Apple or Tim Cook wish to inflict. As consumers, we operate within a no-win system in which the corporations that own most of the world have made it impossible to consume in an entirely ethical way. I tend to view this situation like I view recycling: It’s good to do, but with the awareness that the buck has been passed down to less powerful individuals by the large corporate entities that could enact meaningful change.

Tim Cook could just as well decide tomorrow to give each of his many employees an equal stake in the company. He could let unions flower, commit to meaningful diversity, and decide to no longer materially support the Trump administration that’s happy to let people give Nazi salutes and allow planes to fall from the sky. But he won’t. He’s a CEO and has a fiduciary duty. It would be ridiculous to expect otherwise. None of this makes Severance or its messages less meaningful or real. What this all comes to is consuming media with open eyes. It’s not on viewers that all media is owned and operated by capitalist ghouls for profit, but we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to that fact. Love Severance to your heart’s content, but don’t mistake it for any reflection of the corporation that produced it. They want to seem like they’re in on the joke, but the joke will be on us if we think they’re any more enlightened.