Richard
08-03-2009, 06:34
An interesting dilemma for the all-vol force. ;)
FWIW - I always cringe whenever some weenie (command, staff, marketing, sales, etc) starts using such bland business terminology as marketing the officer “product" or brand or product management in reference to humans or leaders - especially of warriors. :mad:
Richard's $.02 :munchin
With Enough Soldiers, the Army Is Looking for a Few Good Officers
Douglas quenqua, NYT, 2 aUG 2009
AFTER three straight years of growth — helped in part by a sagging job market — the Army is starting to find itself a bit bottom heavy, swollen with young recruits but short on officers to lead them. Starting Monday, it is hoping a fresh promotional effort can reverse that.
For the first time in its history, the Army is introducing an advertising campaign to recruit officers. The ads in many ways resemble the force’s mainstream recruitment effort — camouflaged soldiers carrying big guns and standing at attention, with patriotic music as the soundtrack — but have been tweaked to appeal to achievement-oriented college graduates who could qualify for one of its officer training programs.
For example, two of the TV commercials could be mistaken for ads from I.B.M. or Accenture until the Army’s signature music chimes in about halfway through. Another shows pictures of famous generals like George Washington, Douglas MacArthur and Colin Powell, while a voice-over says, “Officers in the U.S. Army can rise to any challenge. Can you?”
The goals are to attract ambitious young Americans who might normally consider the Army beneath their career objectives and give the Army a jolt of much-needed creative leadership.
“It’s a tough environment out there,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, head of the Army Accessions Command, which oversees recruiting. “It’s no longer where the enemy lines up on one side of the field and the coalition lines up on the other side and the referee blows the whistle. It’s a very complicated battlefield to figure out, and there are no referees.
“It is a different era, and it requires a different kind of thinker,” he said.
The Army’s growing pains are reflected in its recruitment statistics. The force has expanded by more than 50,000 troops since 2005, reaching 544,000 at the end of 2008. And last month, the defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, announced his intention to add 22,000 troops in the next year. The expansion of the Army has come in response to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that taxed the scaled-back force that emerged from the 1990s.
But some of that growth can be attributed to relaxed standards. Only 83 percent of new recruits in 2008 held a high school diploma, missing the Army’s goal of 90 percent for the third consecutive year. A growing percentage of new recruits during that time have also been scoring in the lowest acceptable range on the Army’s vocational aptitude test.
So while the force is meeting or exceeding its goals in terms of pure numbers, it is falling short in its search for men and women qualified to lead their peers.
“The economic downturn has made it really easy for the Army to recruit in recent years, and that was a big surprise to people who thought a big shooting war would discourage people from signing up in the first place,” said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, a research organization. “But because of changes in threats and shifts in domestic demographics, the military is looking for a different type of officer today than what it was seeking in the past, and that requires special recruiting efforts.”
Four TV commercials will provide the public face of the campaign, all of which begin running Monday. The two that slowly reveal themselves to be Army ads tell the story of high-ranking corporate executives with experience as Army officers: Joseph DePinto, chief executive of 7-Eleven; and Otto Padron, a senior vice president at Univision.
“We learned through research that when the ‘Army Strong’ music came on in that first second of the commercial, those achievement-oriented students would reject it because they would think it was not for them,” said George Dewey, executive creative director at McCann Erickson, the Army’s creative agency. “When these kids find out that the Army has produced these superstars, it’s an ‘aha’ moment for them.”
That is also the thinking behind an ad that features George Washington and Colin Powell. The final ad, which more closely resembles a typical Army commercial, features a current officer explaining his decision to join the R.O.T.C.
The TV ads will mostly run during the same programs as the mainstream recruitment commercials, like “CSI: Miami,” “Law and Order” and sports programming. Web ads will run on ESPN.com and other major sites, but also destinations like Stack.com, a site for achievement-oriented athletes.
McCann Erickson is part of McCann Worldgroup, a collection of creative, media, digital and public relations agencies, each of which has a hand in the wide-ranging campaign. Worldgroup, which is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, took over the Army’s advertising account in 2006, when it introduced the “Army Strong” tag line, replacing “Army of One.”
The online centerpiece of the campaign is a microsite, GoArmy.com/officer, where potential candidates can answer a series of questions that determines which of the four paths to becoming an officer is right for them. Those paths are Army R.O.T.C., the Military Academy at West Point, direct commission and officer candidate school.
The site also contains videos, each less than five minutes long, explaining more about each of the paths. Potential candidates can use the site to download information and make contact with a recruiter. The site was created by MRM, the digital arm of McCann Worldgroup.
The Army is also working with Major League Baseball to produce a program called “Leaders of the Diamond,” a series of interviews with all-stars about leadership and dedication that will appear on MLB.com. It is also hosting panel discussions at universities around the country this fall at which students can talk to officers directly.
The goal of the campaign is not just to recruit officers now, said General Freakley, but also to begin doing a better job of marketing the officer “product” to young Americans.
“If you think about it as brand or product management, we have this product within our brand that gets no notoriety,” he said. “For those who just graduated college, now is the time to become aware they can come to officer candidate school. We think the timing is right to get the notion out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/business/media/03adco.html?ref=us
FWIW - I always cringe whenever some weenie (command, staff, marketing, sales, etc) starts using such bland business terminology as marketing the officer “product" or brand or product management in reference to humans or leaders - especially of warriors. :mad:
Richard's $.02 :munchin
With Enough Soldiers, the Army Is Looking for a Few Good Officers
Douglas quenqua, NYT, 2 aUG 2009
AFTER three straight years of growth — helped in part by a sagging job market — the Army is starting to find itself a bit bottom heavy, swollen with young recruits but short on officers to lead them. Starting Monday, it is hoping a fresh promotional effort can reverse that.
For the first time in its history, the Army is introducing an advertising campaign to recruit officers. The ads in many ways resemble the force’s mainstream recruitment effort — camouflaged soldiers carrying big guns and standing at attention, with patriotic music as the soundtrack — but have been tweaked to appeal to achievement-oriented college graduates who could qualify for one of its officer training programs.
For example, two of the TV commercials could be mistaken for ads from I.B.M. or Accenture until the Army’s signature music chimes in about halfway through. Another shows pictures of famous generals like George Washington, Douglas MacArthur and Colin Powell, while a voice-over says, “Officers in the U.S. Army can rise to any challenge. Can you?”
The goals are to attract ambitious young Americans who might normally consider the Army beneath their career objectives and give the Army a jolt of much-needed creative leadership.
“It’s a tough environment out there,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, head of the Army Accessions Command, which oversees recruiting. “It’s no longer where the enemy lines up on one side of the field and the coalition lines up on the other side and the referee blows the whistle. It’s a very complicated battlefield to figure out, and there are no referees.
“It is a different era, and it requires a different kind of thinker,” he said.
The Army’s growing pains are reflected in its recruitment statistics. The force has expanded by more than 50,000 troops since 2005, reaching 544,000 at the end of 2008. And last month, the defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, announced his intention to add 22,000 troops in the next year. The expansion of the Army has come in response to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that taxed the scaled-back force that emerged from the 1990s.
But some of that growth can be attributed to relaxed standards. Only 83 percent of new recruits in 2008 held a high school diploma, missing the Army’s goal of 90 percent for the third consecutive year. A growing percentage of new recruits during that time have also been scoring in the lowest acceptable range on the Army’s vocational aptitude test.
So while the force is meeting or exceeding its goals in terms of pure numbers, it is falling short in its search for men and women qualified to lead their peers.
“The economic downturn has made it really easy for the Army to recruit in recent years, and that was a big surprise to people who thought a big shooting war would discourage people from signing up in the first place,” said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, a research organization. “But because of changes in threats and shifts in domestic demographics, the military is looking for a different type of officer today than what it was seeking in the past, and that requires special recruiting efforts.”
Four TV commercials will provide the public face of the campaign, all of which begin running Monday. The two that slowly reveal themselves to be Army ads tell the story of high-ranking corporate executives with experience as Army officers: Joseph DePinto, chief executive of 7-Eleven; and Otto Padron, a senior vice president at Univision.
“We learned through research that when the ‘Army Strong’ music came on in that first second of the commercial, those achievement-oriented students would reject it because they would think it was not for them,” said George Dewey, executive creative director at McCann Erickson, the Army’s creative agency. “When these kids find out that the Army has produced these superstars, it’s an ‘aha’ moment for them.”
That is also the thinking behind an ad that features George Washington and Colin Powell. The final ad, which more closely resembles a typical Army commercial, features a current officer explaining his decision to join the R.O.T.C.
The TV ads will mostly run during the same programs as the mainstream recruitment commercials, like “CSI: Miami,” “Law and Order” and sports programming. Web ads will run on ESPN.com and other major sites, but also destinations like Stack.com, a site for achievement-oriented athletes.
McCann Erickson is part of McCann Worldgroup, a collection of creative, media, digital and public relations agencies, each of which has a hand in the wide-ranging campaign. Worldgroup, which is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, took over the Army’s advertising account in 2006, when it introduced the “Army Strong” tag line, replacing “Army of One.”
The online centerpiece of the campaign is a microsite, GoArmy.com/officer, where potential candidates can answer a series of questions that determines which of the four paths to becoming an officer is right for them. Those paths are Army R.O.T.C., the Military Academy at West Point, direct commission and officer candidate school.
The site also contains videos, each less than five minutes long, explaining more about each of the paths. Potential candidates can use the site to download information and make contact with a recruiter. The site was created by MRM, the digital arm of McCann Worldgroup.
The Army is also working with Major League Baseball to produce a program called “Leaders of the Diamond,” a series of interviews with all-stars about leadership and dedication that will appear on MLB.com. It is also hosting panel discussions at universities around the country this fall at which students can talk to officers directly.
The goal of the campaign is not just to recruit officers now, said General Freakley, but also to begin doing a better job of marketing the officer “product” to young Americans.
“If you think about it as brand or product management, we have this product within our brand that gets no notoriety,” he said. “For those who just graduated college, now is the time to become aware they can come to officer candidate school. We think the timing is right to get the notion out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/business/media/03adco.html?ref=us