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Company: U.S. Army Game Project
Event: Virtual Army Experience (VAE)
Objective: Increase the pool of 17-to-24 year-olds who would consider enlisting in the Army.
Strategy: Educate visitors with entertaining attractions that highlight Army life, and inform prospective recruits about career opportunities. Use measurement tools to hone approaches.
Tactics: Offer exhibits and presentations on military careers, including video games and a virtual-reality mission. Track attendees with RFID tags to measure interests and personalize recruiting efforts.
Results: Attracted 155,000 attendees, including 37,817 high-quality leads, and generated 1,085 media mentions and 118 million impressions — valued at $3.4 million worth of publicity.
Creative Agencies: Ignited LLC, www.ignitedUSA.com; Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA), www.americasarmy.com
Production Agencies: U.S. Army Software Engineering Directorate, Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center, www.redstone.army.mil/amrdec/sed; Performance Marketing Group Inc., www.pmgincorporated.com; The Scenic Route Inc., www.the-scenic-route.com; Fish Software Inc.,
www.fishsoftware.com
Budget: $24 million
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 ecruiting soldiers used to be as easy as a game of paint ball. In World War I, all it took was colorful posters depicting America as a damsel in distress that daring young men could rescue, or advertising the laundry list of martial skills recruits would master in the Army, such as the manly art of boxing. Other recruiting campaigns trumpeted appeals to patriotism, like James Montgomery Flagg’s iconic “I Want You for U.S. Army.” During the Vietnam War, the military resorted to sex appeal, crowning sultry Jane Fonda “Miss Army Recruiting of 1962.” That one worked out about as well as the war itself, but in the post-Vietnam years of
the all-volunteer “Draft beer, not people” Army, it lobbed slogans on television commercials and print ads, including the beyond-famous “Be All You Can Be” campaign.
Recruiting had become as different from those earlier eras as a musket is from an M16. And with a war as brutal and unpopular as a roadside bomb — by 2006, nearly two-thirds of Americans opposed the conflict in Iraq — the Army’s recruiting goals began a forced retreat. In 2005, despite spending almost $2 billion a year on marketing, the Army fell short of its monthly recruiting targets by as
much as 42 percent, and missed its annual recruitment goal by 8 percent, making it the worst recruiting year in almost two decades. Yet the Army was still in denial
that the old way of recruiting, which relied on national advertising and a network of 1,650 local recruiting stations across the United States and overseas, was as dead as Custer.
“Once the technology had moved past TV to the Internet and video games,” says Colonel Casey Wardynski, a 29-year veteran who developed the hyper-popular video game “America’s Army” in 2002 for the military, “a window closed for us with the people we were trying to reach.” Out-gunned and outmaneuvered by technologies and social realities, the Army had to adopt a smarter strategy to attract a generation more likely to be familiar with “World of Warcraft” than World War II.
FULL-METAL RECRUITING
In February 2007, the Army went on the offensive with the Virtual Army Experience (VAE). Inspired by the America’s Army PC game and Designed and fabricated by Los Angeles-based Ignited LLC, the interactive mobile exhibit can be used in two configurations: 14,500 square feet or 19,500 square feet. Debuting at a NASCAR Speedweeks event in Daytona, FL, in February 2007, the VAE marched to 35 venues around the nation that year. Aiming at events that run for two or more days and that supplied a steady flow of its key demographic, the VAE set up at car races, music festivals, theme parks, state fairs, rodeos, and air shows. The massive logistics to carry out the martial tour de force were handled by Performance Marketing Group Inc. of Carmel, IN.
The mobile event was as radical a departure from the Army’s previous recruiting efforts as a cruise missile is from a catapult. Before, the Army wheeled out climbing walls and tire-changing competitions at air shows and auto races based on the assumption that its chief target had in some ways changed little since almost a century ago, when testosterone-filled males were drawn by the lure of learning to box and handle a machine gun. But the Army had committed the cardinal mistake of warfare: It was fighting the next war with the tools and tactics of the last one. Now, because its audience was no longer drawn to the bait and lures of before, its strategy shifted from a conventional one to another shaped by the tactics of guerilla warfare: observe, learn, and revise in the field.
The plan, in a mortar shell, was to use the VAE to not only lure in potential prospects, but to serve as an info-gathering hub that would inform Army personnel about each individual’s preferences, along with his or her interests and likelihood of enlisting. “Information warfare applies as much to the recruiting battlefield as it does to any other battlefield,” says Wardynski, who conceived the VAE. “If we were going to recruit more individuals, we needed to know more about them.”
 At the two-day-long Quad City Air Show in Dubuque, IA, which typically draws 100,000 people every June, dozens of young men and women (27.4 percent of visitors were female) idled in line for up to two hours to experience the VAE. Covered with branded, desert camouflage-like material stretched over a truss structure, the 5,400-pound VAE’s hard-to-miss, three-story-high
inflatable dome drew attendees with a glassed-in front and 6-by-9-foot LED screens running adrenaline-rush glimpses of the live-action video game going on inside. The video’s ninja-quick bursts of action hinted at the high-tech tools deployed inside the VAE, and kept the attendees engaged and eager. “We wanted to give them what TV, Hollywood, and even the Net can’t — a test drive of the Army,” Wardynski says.
Moments before attendees entered the tent, Army personnel registered them, scanned their driver’s license photos, and took down their age and contact information in the span of 90 seconds to two minutes. Welcoming 46 attendees at a time into the VAE, the Army surveyed visitors on their personal interests and goals as well as educational levels and when they might be making decisions about their careers. Then staffers fed the deluge of data
into a networked, GPS-enabled series of scanners and handheld computers connected to RFID badges (aka “Blue Force Trackers”) issued to every prospect that tracked their movements in the 150-by-130-foot area. “That was when we started our reconnaissance,” Wardynski says.
But that recon was much more involved than a simple observe-and-report approach. Supplied and programmed by Carrollton, TX-based Fish Software Inc., the Blue Force Trackers, named for the RFID-based system the military uses to track its own soldiers and equipment in combat, broadcast data as far as 200 feet away to the Army personnel waiting inside. Programmed by Huntsville, AL-headquartered U.S. Army Software Engineering Directorate, Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center, the VAE’s central server learned from the badges’ sensors how close visitors were to the on-site recruiters. The server then relayed attendees’ location and information to nearby recruiters’ handheld PCs. After staffers interacted with a prospect, they updated his or her propensity to enlist — a calculation based on the attendee’s stated goals and interests, current educational status, whether the attendee is considering the armed forces as a career, and if the attendee expressed an interest in Army programs that help pay for college. That updated information was then communicated back to the central server, which crunched the data and automatically re-ranked the visitors based on the likelihood of future enlistment.
 When visitors stepped inside the VAE, they were transported to the military realm of soldiers, weapons, ammo boxes, maps, and other martial miscellanea all strewn about with the typical organized chaos of an Army camp. Their first stop: a 53-foot-long “engagement trailer” where they played the “America’s Army” game on a laptop or Xbox 360 console. Now managed by the West Point, NY-based Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis and ranking among the top 10 online PC action games of all time with an estimated 10 million registered players, “America’s Army” was a no-brainer draw for the Army’s tech-addicted target audience.
Next, with the help of Army staffers, attendees operated a computer-training simulator for the Army’s PackBot, a series of Labrador-sized mechanical marvels used by ground troops to help clear caves, search buildings, and cross live minefields. The PC-based simulator was the exact same kind the Army uses to train its soldiers to operate the robot. If the PackBot simulation whetted prospects’ appetite for the real thing, they could also take a MARCbot IV (Multi-function Agile Remote Control Robot) outside the VAE for a trial run. Using a remote control, potential recruits operated the Tonka truck-like device, which is used to inspect suspicious items that might be more boom than benign, just as actual soldiers do in the field.
“What the Army did here was brilliant. The old one-way marketing with TV ads and slogans seemed to be telling recruits to get a haircut and put on a suit and tie,” says Issa Sawabini, a partner at Fuse Marketing Inc., a Burlington, VT-based agency specializing in youth marketing for brands from Motorola to Mountain Dew. “In the VAE, the Army approached them with the familiar icons of their digital world, from video games to robots. It was a way of suggesting, ‘We understand what’s important to you because we’re like you.’”
After messing around with the bots and the games, visitors moved to any of four stations located outside the trailer where additional staffers stood by with video presentations. The short videos covered the main vocational areas potential recruits might pursue, from tanks and logistics to the spy-versus-spy world of intelligence. The videos also featured trivia, information on Army medical careers, and key messages regarding the quality of life recruits could expect in the service. As visitors passed by the video stations, their RFID badges tracked and transmitted information on which stations they stopped at and how long they lingered there, indicating their individual areas of interest — a critical component to personalizing on-site conversations and post-event follow-up communiqués.
GOING COMMANDO
Since the Army understood that its target audience likes to get its G.I. Joe on, the event’s pièce de résistance was the virtual-reality experience. Uniformed VAE staff escorted visitors to the nearby Joint Operations center, where real soldiers guided them through their upcoming mission: rescuing a group of humanitarian-aid workers and refugees held hostage by a heavily armed genocidal faction in the fictional desert city of Nradreg. The experts discussed how teamwork, aided by Army technologies and assisted by its values, would help them accomplish the mission. Staffers also explained that each participant would receive a score at the end of the mission, based on how well he or she faired during the simulation.
 Now it was time to lock and load. Visitors scrambled onto one of the six Humvees while others hopped on Black Hawk or Apache helicopters positioned under the dome between the trailers. Sophisticated mock-ups of the real thing by Pacoima, CA-based The Scenic Route Inc., the combat vehicles were rigged with motion-simulation technology. Each participant manned a mock weapon — the M240 machine gun in the Humvee’s roof turret, or an M4 rifle or M249 automatic weapon in the choppers, among others. Then, with an arid wilderness whooshing by them on 36 immersive 85-by-116-inch projection screens, participants stormed terrorists from the sky and the ground, who smacked the copters and body-slammed the Humvee with their virtual rockets and explosives, shaking and rolling them like a Six Flags ride from hell.
Soldiers in the choppers returned fire with their light arms, rocket-propelled grenades, and anti-tank missiles, while those in the Humvee exploded 950 rounds a minute from the tremoring M240 that zippered back and forth on a circular track. Afterward, with the hostiles sacked and the hostages safe, the words “Mission Accomplished” flashed on the giant screens. For the attendees, the action was intentionally designed to be like crack on speed. “The experience that’s the most vivid can win when it comes to creating a lasting impression,” Wardynski says. “It can beat almost any other competing image they might have of the Army — whether it’s from the Internet, the movies, or their uncle Joe.” When the mission was over, staffers debriefed participants on the skirmish, comparing their scores to those of actual soldiers who had pitted themselves against the virtual-reality simulator.
Finally, before departing the VAE, visitors had the opportunity to have one-on-one conversations with America’s Army Real Heroes, the soldiers who have won the Silver or Bronze Star with valor for courage under the crucible of combat. The real-life heroes talked with potential recruits about the promising opportunities as well as the grave realities of joining the Army, answering any questions and addressing any concerns. Again, thanks to the RFID badges’ computed rankings, staffers were able to target and spend more time with the most likely recruits, personalizing their conversations based on the interests attendees indicated by their survey responses and behavior inside the VAE.
As visitors wrapped up their conversations with the soldiers and exited the VAE, the Army was already strategizing its next mission: a post-event follow-up e-mail sent to every attendee who expressed interest in the armed forces. But thanks to the data accumulated by the RFID devices, this was no one-size-fits-all message you might expect from a mass e-mailing. Instead, the e-mails addressed recipients’ individual interests (based on their survey data, the video stations at which they spent the most time, etc.), and included a link to where they could download pictures snapped of them in action during their virtual rescue mission.
AFTER ACTION REPORT
The VAE revolutionized Army recruiting as dramatically as GPS devices and smart bombs transformed combat in the First Gulf War. Consuming just 10 percent of the Army’s event-marketing budget with its $24 million price tag, the VAE won 30 percent of the leads generated by all of the service’s events held in 2008. Moreover, the VAE’s high-tech computer system cut the amount of junk leads — i.e., mistakes stemming from the Army’s then-inability to gauge and focus on prospects’ interests, as well as rank them more efficiently by their likelihood of enlisting — from the usual 30 percent or more at other recruiting events down to less than 2 percent. In fact, the Army’s own analysis concluded that the VAE outperformed all other Army recruiting efforts by 250 percent.
 After two years and almost 120 events, nearly 155,000 unique visitors have gone through the VAE. Among those, 37,817, or more than 24 percent, fit all the Army’s screening criteria for service, making them high-quality leads with a relatively high likelihood of eventual enlistment. The numbers are even more impressive on the media front, with coverage resulting in more than 1,085 stories to date, 97 percent of which the Army deemed positive. Profiled in periodicals from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post to Wired magazine and Fox News, the VAE generated nearly 118 million impressions, which the Army estimates is the equivalent of $3.4 million worth of advertising.
By the end of 2008, the Army had exceeded its recruiting goals by 1 percent, thanks in large part to the success of the VAE. That victory march continued into 2009, with the service meeting almost 53 percent of its recruiting goals for the regular Active Army and nearly 57 percent of its target for the Army Reserve by the end of the year’s first quarter.
The results were also enough to impress this year’s Corporate EVENT Awards judges. “It’s amazing,” said one judge, won over by what he hailed as the VAE’s “brilliant” and “on target” marketing. “This is probably the best recruiting strategy the Army has ever adopted,” another judge added. “After all, this event wasn’t just trying to persuade people to buy something; it was attempting to persuade them to make a very serious, years-long commitment, and it was extremely successful.”
 As in any triumph, there are many soldiers to credit. But the VAE’s strategy of knowing its “foe” — antiquated assumptions about the Army formed by family, peers, and pop culture; marketing preferences shaped by the Web; and entertainment tastes defined by video games — enabled it to take a beachhead that no one else can claim.
Furthermore, the VAE’s active recon efforts provided the Army with unparalleled insight into the hearts and minds of each of the potential recruits that participated in the experience — a major marketing coup that will help the Army continue to hone its efforts. After all, as Sun Tzu wrote in the “Art of War” approximately 2,500 years ago, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.” E
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