Army Fights to Sell Itself to the Parents of America

Success in advertising usually means getting people to part with their hard-earned cash. Ray DeThorne’s success is measured by how many people he can get to let go of their sons and daughters.

As brand manager for the Army’s advertising account at Leo Burnett Inc., a Chicago ad agency, DeThorne’s job is to sell the Army. And these days, it’s a difficult product to sell.

In marketing terms, the Army is a troubled brand. The daily images of violence from Iraq are scaring away potential recruits for the service that has shouldered the largest burden there.

The Army does not expect to meet any of its 2005 recruiting goals for the active, Reserve and National Guard ranks, and Army officials have said that next year the gap is likely to be greater.

This year, DeThorne will spend more than $200 million of the Army’s money -- the U.S. government’s largest advertising contract -- to try to reverse that trend and sell the nation on the benefits of military service.

It is a job that gets more difficult each morning, when Americans read over breakfast about the latest roadside bomb or insurgent ambush that killed another handful of U.S. solders.

“This is the most complicated, multilayered thing I have ever worked on,” said DeThorne, who slips in and out of marketing jargon when discussing the challenge. “Every day you pick up the paper and there is a story reframing the product you are trying to sell.”

Yet the problem for DeThorne and the Army goes deeper than the headlines from Iraq. As the percentage of adult Americans with military experience plummets -- about 11% today, compared with 20% in 1970 -- the young men and women sought by the Army are increasingly being raised by parents who didn’t serve in the armed forces. Today’s parents are likely to be more skeptical of military life than were their parents or grandparents, Army market research says.

It is the parents -- or “influencers,” as the Pentagon calls them -- who are proving the most formidable obstacle to the Army’s ability to meet its recruiting goals.

The problem is compounded in the middle of a protracted war, as already-skeptical parents are fearful that their child’s decision to join the Army means he or she is bound to end up in Iraq.

“It’s very different from folks who grew up with communism and the ‘Red Menace,’ ” said DeThorne, 46, who was raised in a military family but has not served in the armed forces. The military is “just not something that is on people’s radar screen.”

Leo Burnett’s latest advertising campaign for the Army addresses the problem head-on -- by avoiding the war in Iraq.

In the ads, which began airing in April, there is no mention of combat, no shots of tanks driving through the desert, and no mention of an increasingly unpopular war.

More pragmatic than patriotic, the ads are a series of conversations between parents and their children. And the vignettes emphasize themes that resonate with parents of teenagers: how the Army can pay for college, provide career training and turn a listless kid into a focused, responsible citizen.

In one of the ads, a father and son are chatting on their front porch on a rainy evening. As the son listens, decked out in his formal uniform, the father tells him that he is a “changed man.”

“You got off the train back there, you did two things you’ve never done before, at least not at the same time,” the father says, fighting back his emotions. “You shook my hand, and you looked me square in the eye. Where did that come from?”

Col. Thomas Nickerson, who heads the Army’s strategic marketing effort and signs off on all of the Army’s advertising, said the Leo Burnett advertisements were designed to show parents that the Army was about more than combat.

“The single message we want to communicate in our advertising is that the Army will help someone be successful at whatever they have set as a goal for their lives,” Nickerson said.

Each of the advertisements carries the tagline: “Help them find their strength” (“Ayudelos a descubrir su fortaleza,” in the Spanish-language ad produced for the Latino market).

As part of a separate campaign aimed at parents, the Pentagon this year began a television advertisement starring Donald Trump and Kelly Perdew, a former military intelligence officer and the winner of “The Apprentice 2,” the billionaire’s television reality show. The Trump ad, part of the Pentagon’s “Today’s Military” campaign, emphasized that the qualities Perdew acquired while in the military equipped him for a successful career in the private sector.

A Pentagon website explains the reasoning behind the “Today’s Military” campaign, which was produced by Mullen Advertising of Massachusetts: “With research showing that traditional themes of patriotism and duty were less resonant with adult influencers, the campaign instead focused on the following theme: ‘The qualities you acquire while in the military are qualities that stay with you forever.’ ”

The evocative television spots -- especially Leo Burnett’s Army advertisements -- have won praise from advertising experts. Yet many are skeptical that the ads will make a significant difference in the effort to persuade parents and their children to commit to a life in the military.

Given the daily coverage from Iraq, the Army faces a nearly impossible marketing challenge, said Ira Teinowitz, who covers Army marketing for Advertising Age.

“The Army’s brand name is being created outside the Army,” Teinowitz said. “It’s not something that’s controllable by the Army. It’s certainly not something that’s controllable by advertising.”

It is difficult for the Army to sell its message of duty and sacrifice, largely because little sacrifice is being asked of America, Teinowitz said.

“When everybody’s talking about Paris Hilton and ‘The Dukes of Hazzard,’ and there is no real suffering in the U.S. to the extent it happened during World War II, how can you convince parents that they should take part in the suffering?”

Nickerson admits that the Army has a difficult mission, and points out that this is the first time the U.S. has tried recruiting an all-volunteer military in the middle of a protracted war. It’s a challenge that everyone needs to live up to, he said.

“It’s not just an Army challenge. It’s a challenge for the nation,” Nickerson said. “We’re asking people to do their part.”

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Each year, the Army attempts to bring more than 165,000 new soldiers into its active duty, Reserve and National Guard ranks -- more than the three other military services combined. It is an annual challenge the Army began struggling with a decade ago, when a booming economy lured potential recruits into the private sector.

After the Army missed its recruiting goals for several years in the late 1990s, then-Army Secretary Louis Caldera commissioned the Rand Corp. to help find out why the Army was having trouble reaching America’s youth.

“That study told us we didn’t have anybody in the Army who understood marketing,” Caldera said in January 2001. “They told us we didn’t have an Army ‘brand.’ ”

In response, the Army signed up Leo Burnett to create a brand.

Immersing themselves in Army culture, members of the Leo Burnett team endured a mini-boot camp in South Carolina and traveled to dozens of military bases in the U.S. and in the war-torn Balkans. DeThorne even jumped out of an airplane with the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team.

In early 2001, the Army announced its “Army of One” advertisements, a campaign of individualism that market research showed would appeal to the youth known as Generation Y. The ads carried the theme “212 Ways to Be a Soldier” and focused on individual careers in the military that honed soldiers’ skills for life.

The television ads won high marks in the advertising industry, although many active-duty and retired Army officers criticized the message. In the Army, they argued, the individual is always subordinate to the platoon, company or battalion.

“[The ‘Army of One’ campaign] wasn’t a bad idea. It just doesn’t match the reality of what the Army stands for,” said Seth Godin, an author of books on marketing.

Godin said the military had strayed from the marketing formula that had worked for decades: telling individual stories of battlefield heroism.

Most important, Godin said, the Army brand is hurt by a lack of effort in Washington to sell Americans on the value of military service. It is the White House, not an advertising agency, that needs to make the Army’s case to the nation during wartime, he said.

“In the end, it will not be Leo Burnett that sells the Army,” Godin said. “The most important people in charge of marketing for the Army are the president and the secretary of Defense.”

Even the gush of patriotism that followed the Sept. 11 attacks did not translate into a flood of young people signing up at Army recruiting stations, DeThorne said.

“There was a surge of people buying American flags after 9/11,” he said. “But there was no surge in people rushing in saying that they wanted to join the Army.”

This summer, the Army extended Leo Burnett’s contract through the end of the year. But the Pentagon is accepting bids from other advertising agencies to win a multiyear contract worth as much as $1 billion.

Which means DeThorne will again have to sell the Army on his plan to sell the Army to Americans.

“The Army today is in a better position in the minds of the American people because people understand why we need an army,” DeThorne said.

“The challenge for me is getting them to go to the next step -- convincing parents that having their child join the Army is a good thing. And I don’t think we’re there yet.”