With Recruiting Goals Exceeded, Marines Toughen Their Ad Pitch

September 18, 2009
With Recruiting Goals Exceeded, Marines Toughen Their Ad Pitch
By JAMES DAO

Calvin Klein it’s not. The advertisement shows men crawling through mud and under barbed wire, being smacked in the head with padded fighting sticks, vomiting after inhaling tear gas and diving, boots and all, into a swimming pool.

If it sounds like a teaser for a survival reality show, that’s not far off the mark. On Saturday, the Marine Corps will unveil its newest advertising campaign, and unlike past campaigns featuring the Marines’ stately Silent Drill Platoon in dress uniform, the new spot highlights in high-definition detail the grit, sweat and tears of boot camp.

“It’s not soft,” said Maj. Gen. Robert E. Milstead Jr., who heads the Marine Corps Recruiting Command. “It’s not showing people in a nice uniform. It’s not showing all the good things. It’s in your face.”

The new approach is a result of recruiting successes, General Milstead said. Thanks in part to the weak economy, the corps is ahead of its recruiting goals not only for this year but for the next three as well. And so the high command has concluded that it can be pickier about new recruits.

“We’re going to toss a challenge,” General Milstead said. “And if you rise to the challenge, we’ll make you only one promise: we’ll make you a United States Marine. That resonates to young men and women.”

The corps is not the only service meeting its goals. As is typical when job markets are weak, all the services have been meeting or exceeding their targets, including the Army, which struggled just a few years ago when the economy was strong and the Iraq war was sending home large numbers of casualties.

General Milstead said that in 2008, the corps had its most bountiful recruiting year since 1984, bringing in about 42,000 new Marines. He also noted that the quality of recruits was higher: nearly 99 percent this year are high school graduates, up from 95 percent in 2007.

The bumper crop has been such that many new enlistees must now wait six months or more to get a spot in boot camp, and the corps has already met its five-year mission to expand by 27,000 Marines. Two years ago, when Congress authorized the corps, the smallest of the military services, to grow to 202,000 from 175,000, the leadership thought it could not reach the goal until 2012. Instead, it was reached this summer.

The new advertising campaign tries to capitalize on the Marines’ image, part reality and part burnished myth, as the toughest and most selective of the services. A 60-second spot shows three young men — one black, one Latino and one white — hearing a silent call, and then running toward the rigors of basic training, a drill instructor shouting, “Move it!”

The spot, which will first be televised during the Florida-Tennessee college football game on CBS this Saturday and during pro football games Sunday and then Monday night, was produced by JWT, the advertising agency that has long been a consultant to the corps. The director was Simon Crane, whose film credits include helping direct the Normandy beach scene in “Saving Private Ryan.”

Shot on location mostly at Parris Island, S.C., the corps’s East Coast training station, the spot shows real Marines doing real basic training exercises, although actually the Marines shown are members of the elite Silent Drill Platoon, not new recruits.

With its focus on men doing rigorous basic training exercises, the new spot has a more testosterone-fueled quality than last year’s campaign, which featured the precise rifle-handling exhibition of the Silent Drill Platoon at iconic American locales, from Times Square to the Hoover Dam.

It also makes no effort to show the emotional or mental challenges involved in being a Marine, like coping with combat stress or death. General Milstead said future spots might take on some of those themes.

General Milstead called the new campaign, titled “America’s Few,” a “prequel” to last year’s campaign, because it shows how recruits are transformed into Marines. “It’s the truthful, gritty image of what it takes,” he said.

Commercial video link.