Many people in the accounting profession—including, but not limited to just CPAs themselves—fret over the dearth of accountants and what to do to address the decline in numbers of those entering the field.

What is needed is an image makeover, columnist Joe Queenan wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Citing certain stereotypes of accountants—such as “bean counters,” “persnickety fussbudgets who are obsessed with trivial details,” and “unexciting numbers crunchers whose eyes are concealed behind green eyeshades”—Queenan made two suggestions to remake that image.

One is to raise salaries. The other is to offer testimonials from “flashy, exciting practitioners of the trade” to make the profession “seem more glamorous and appealing.”

He gave three examples: his best friend, a retired auditor who has played lead guitar in a psychedelic rock band for almost half a century; a friend who started playing ice hockey in his 40s and into his 50s; and his wife, who left her accounting job in England for one writing educational video scripts for the AICPA that were anything but boring.

Writing that the profession “needs to combat its public profile as being dreary, tedious and sad,” Queenan mused that a major accounting firm should persuade Jay-Z or Miley Cyrus to appear in a Super Bowl ad. That “would help to demolish the stereotype of accountants as dull-as-dishwater ledger-entry obsessives,” he wrote.

A 30-second ad during Super Bowl 57 costs between $6 million and $7 million, Variety reported in September.