You'd have to have been raised in a bunker not to know that the place to "Be All You Can Be" is the U.S. Army. The catchy recruiting slogan, developed in the late '70s by the ad agency N. W. Ayer, served the Army faithfully for two decades. Advertising Age named it the second-best jingle of the last century (Mickey D's "You Deserve a Break Today" topped the list; see Jingle All the Way). But in the late '90s, when the Army was increasingly having trouble meeting recruiting goals, the top brass thought it might be time for a change. After all, the slogan itself was older than many of the kids the Army was trying to recruit, and the tone was out of step with the times, sounding more like a nagging lecture than an invitation to greatness. "We had taken the finger off the pulse of young people," says Louis Caldera, a Harvard MBA who shook up operating and marketing structures when he served as the Army's 17th secretary, from July 1998 to January 2001. "It was clear that we needed to do business a different way."
Military recruiting ads are like any other advertising, but the stakes can be much higher. If a new fast-food entrée flops, Burger King will survive-but what's an army without soldiers? And so, determined to position itself on the edge of pop culture, the Army put its $150 million annual ad budget up for grabs last year. The Chicago-based Leo Burnett agency beat out Campbell-Ewald (the incumbent, Young & Rubicam, didn't participate in the account review) to win the task of burnishing the Army's image .
Burnett, whose client roster includes McDonald's, Walt Disney, and Coca-Cola, is no stranger to the military. For years, the agency has made a point of hiring employees with military backgrounds, coveting them for their whatever-it-takes-to-get-the-job-done approach. In all, the agency has about 25 ex-military staffers, and they often get together to watch Army-Navy games. But even with all that expertise on staff, the agency still spent thousands of hours researching the weaknesses of the old campaign and developing its replacement. After all, there was a lot on the line-the Army tied some of Burnett's compensation to the campaign's impact on recruitment.
Launched earlier this year, Burnett's campaign was built around a brand-new slogan: "An Army of One." The kickoff ad featured stirring images of a soldier running through the Mojave Desert, his dog tags gleaming in the morning sun. "I am an army of one," says Corporal Richard Lovett in a voice-over. "Even though there are 1,045,690 soldiers just like me, I am my own force. With technology, with training, with support, who I am has become better than who I was. And I'll be the first to tell you, the might of the U.S. Army doesn't lie in numbers. It lies in me. I am an army of one. And you can see my strength."
It's too soon to say whether the campaign will be a success, but the Army says that even before last month's World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, "meaningful leads" for potential recruits were up 24 percent.
In taking over the Army account, Burnett faced a number of problems beyond the faded-wallpaper feel of "Be All You Can Be." For years, a key recruiting strategy had been to lure kids with the promise of money, which they could use to help pay for college after their stint in the Army. The bucks-for-boots tactic worked for a while, but when the labor market tightened, other employers started offering cash for college, too. And the mercenary approach did little to bolster the pride of vets, who traditionally had been some of the Army's best frontline salesmen. Without anybody's touting the intangible benefits of service and patriotism, the Army started looking increasingly like the employer of last resort for those who couldn't cut it in the real world. "The youth that come in have not been coming in for the right reasons," says Staff Sergeant Patrick Earhart, a recruiter based in Oklahoma City, summing up the feelings of many of his colleagues.
Hollywood hadn't been much help, either. In interviews with teens, Burnett found that many of their ideas about the military had come from Blockbuster. Movies like The Thin Red Line and Hamburger Hill left an impression that life in the military is about crawling around in the mud, dodging bullets, and getting yelled at. "You're the lowest form of life on earth," screams the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket. "You are not even human-fucking-beings! You are nothing but unorganized grab-ass-tic pieces of amphibian shit!" Burnett interviewed hundreds of older teenagers who said they assumed people in the Army had different goals and values from their own. On top of that, they said they felt that joining the Army would mean years of lost time. Burnett researchers determined that kids today want flexibility and control over their lives, and they didn't expect to find those in the Army. "The two overriding themes for young adults are 'What's in it for me?' and a need for immediate gratification, or 'nowness,' " says Amy Palmer, a senior planner at Burnett. "Any notion that it's the right thing to do for somebody else or for your country wasn't going to resonate for them." The problems didn't end there. Burnett found that people were stumped as to what life in the Army would be like beyond boot camp. What, exactly, do you do in the Army? March?
Still, amid Burnett's troubling findings, there was one bright spot. If nothing else, the Army had a reputation for building individuals into great leaders. Schwarzkopf? Powell? Both Army. It was this power of the individual that resonated for Mike Colt, an executive creative director at Burnett who oversaw the work of at least a dozen teams assigned to brainstorm ideas for the Army. The notion turned up again and again, he said, particularly in speeches by the Army's chief of staff, General Eric K. Shinseki. "I am proud to be an American Soldier," the general would say. The transcripts-particularly the fact that the word soldier was capitalized-deeply informed Colt's thinking.
"There's this sort of paradox," he says. "An army means a horde of people, and if soldier isn't capitalized, then you're just a nameless and faceless guy in the ranks. It gave me such incredible insight into this man, this sense of pride. I thought, 'This is the tone of voice, this is the Army we need to be talking about.' " Colt put the creative teams to work to bring this notion to life, but nothing they came up with proved satisfying. Then, one night late last October, Colt invited Jeff Moore, a Burnett writer, to his office to chat. Moore's plate was already full, but he heard Colt out. A few nights later, scribbling on a yellow pad in a creative spurt fueled by Dolly Madison doughnuts from the office vending machine, Moore dashed off the entire script for the first ad in about 10 minutes. Not one word was changed from the original draft, which included the "army of one" phrase that was ultimately chosen for the new slogan. "It just had a life of its own," says Colt. Others developed the idea for the shining dog tags in the opening spot to capture the inherent army-of-one paradox: Every soldier has dog tags, but everyone's tags are unique.
That spot would speak to the what's-in-it-for-me ethos of today's teens. But what about their cluelessness regarding Army life? The key to that was found in a fact that surprised many Burnett staffers-that new recruits can pursue one of 212 different jobs. "They do everything-the Army is society," says Colt. "That was new news." Emphasizing that not only lifted the mystery but also took care of the flexibility and control questions.
To address recruits' need for immediate gratification, Burnett developed ads that showed real soldiers shouldering responsibility in tough situations and making snap decisions with an immediate impact. Staring into the camera, one soldier gives a rapid-fire, jargon-laced description of a tight spot he was in. "You're part of a team of intel analysts," he says. "During a conflict simulation, on-the-ground scouts report enemy tank movement in Bravo sector. Air assault. Liftoff's in 30 seconds, when J-STARS radar reports a different enemy position. Quick fix confirms. Apaches are airborne. You have two minutes to decide where they go. What would you do?"
Another strategy: Play into the current craze for reality-based television. Burnett built a phase of the campaign around six new recruits, following them through basic training. "We had to remove impediments, and one was boot camp and the sense that it was just people screaming at you," says Colt. Burnett's strategy is to humanize the Army and change its image from a horde of abused drones to a collection of people with regular lives. At goarmy.com, for example, we meet Drill Sergeant Garrett, who seems a reasonable middle-management type. "If they can execute the training to standard, and if they're having fun doing it, then great," he says.
Not everybody loves the new ads, however. Critics have complained that the campaign is misleading, that any hope a new recruit might have of feeling a sense of individuality in the Army would be dashed after a few hours. "The Army is not, has never been, and will never be about one soldier," Advertising Age critic Bob Garfield wrote. "To suggest otherwise is disingenuous at best." The Army counters that critics are missing the broader point of the campaign. And misleading or not, the campaign is generating lots of new leads. More important, it has quickly lodged itself in the zeitgeist. The title of last season's final Sopranos episode: "Army of One." Clearly, the Army has buzz. Burnett is now watching anxiously to see if that buzz helps fill boots.
