The Bay Area tech company Workday has released a Super Bowl ad featuring actual deities of rock music, mere days after laying off 400 people (about 3% of its workforce).

The 60-second Super Bowl ad for the Pleasanton-based human resources software company, which premiered Monday, features Ozzy Osbourne in corporate garb while a motley crew of rock music legends, including Joan Jett, Billy Idol, Gary Clark Jr. and Kiss frontman Paul Stanley, make appearances describing their rock star working conditions.

“Big corporate types, will you stop calling each other ‘rock stars’?” Stanley bemoans in the ad.

The campaign is clearly supposed to poke fun at the corporate phenomenon of calling a good employee a “rock star,” pushing it to its logical extension. But the ad likely stings for the Workday “rock stars” who were laid off on Jan. 31, less than a week before the ad campaign was shared on Workday’s YouTube account.

In a notice laying off the company's own corporate “rock stars,” Workday co-CEOs Aneel Bhusri and Carl Eschenbach included a note to all employees, attributing the job cuts to a “global economic environment that is challenging for companies of all sizes.”

There is something to be said for Workday having the budget for a multimillion-dollar ad campaign — according to USA Today, it's the company’s “most aggressive ad spend” ever — despite attributing these worker cuts to macroeconomic conditions. A 30-second spot in the biggest TV and sporting event of the year costs $7 million, according to AdAge. (Remember: This ad is a minute long.)

“[Workday] wants to have a lot of fun and make fun of themselves,” Idol told USA Today in an interview. He also seemingly invoked the spirit of "punk rock" in his appearance in the ad campaign.

As of November 2022, Workday had $1.58 billion in its coffers, according to its last publicly available 10-Q filing.