The Army and Navy have found a new battlefield -- both are turning to the Web in their fight to sign up new recruits.
The two branches of the U.S. military are taking similar integrated
approaches to online and traditional advertising by using their two TV campaigns to draw potential recruits to their online ads and their Web sites, according to a new study by Internet researcher
Jupiter Media Metrix.
"The Army's new campaign is created around being an army of one," said Marc Ryan, Jupiter's director of research. "They have really worked on this campaign about
individualizing the army. They pointed people to the Web site to get more information...They are pushing people to the Web to make it more interesting."
The Army has aired TV ads on shows such as
"The Simpsons" and "Friends," while the Navy has used programs like the hit TV series "Survivor."
They also have advertised online on sports sites and job sites, with the Army placing ads on
AltaVista.com, HotJobs.com and RollingStone.com. The Navy has advertised on sites such as Military.com, NBCi and Monster.com.
According to Jupiter figures, the Army, with its "Army of One"
campaign, bought 13.5 million online ad impressions in January, with that number surging to 25.6 million in July. The Navy started catching up on the Army, buying 21.6 million ad impressions in July,
compared with only 3.4 million online ad impressions in January.
During the Army's peak month of online advertising in February, it reached people 18 to 34 years of age 64 percent of the time
when it had 30 million impressions. The Navy reached 55 percent of the same audience during its peak month, which was in July.
According to Jupiter, the Army's success in driving consumers to its
online campaign is partly because of the similarities between its online and traditional campaigns, using the same idea of an "Army of One," the same images of soldiers and the same use of color
tones.
"The Internet is part of the media campaign and not an independent entity," Ryan said. "It's important to make sure all this fits together."
"If you do different things on the
Internet than on TV you can create confusion in the minds of the consumer," he added.
The importance of having a well-designed site that consumers can relate to is also key, Ryan said.
"The
site in itself is a storefront online," he said. "If you go to a site and (it is) a really shoddily designed site, that's really going to have an effect on the consumer."
- Reuters