The Army's Musical Pitch: Download, Join Up

You know that the Army National Guard is having some serious trouble trying to recruit young people when they try this new advertising gimmick. From the Washington Post:

The Army National Guard has been hoping to bend young Americans' ears to a recruiting pitch by giving them something else to listen to first.

The Guard has been targeting 18-to-25-year-olds in online ads that promise three free iTunes music downloads to anyone who agrees to be contacted by a military recruiter.

After three months, more than 770 people have downloaded, although it is too early to tell how many of them will join up, said Lt. Col. Mike Jones, deputy division chief for National Guard recruiting.

The promotion ends Saturday, and officials will study whether the $20,000 budgeted for the campaign was worth it. "Ultimately the goal is not leads but enlistments," Jones said. "At the end of the day, what I'm trying to produce is a soldier that's capable to serve at home and abroad."

These are challenging times for military recruiters. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and deployments to hurricane-stricken areas in the United States have resulted in the activation of tens of thousands of National Guard troops. Many have been killed. It is the rare recruit who believes that his National Guard commitment will be limited to one weekend of training a month and two weeks out of the year.

At the same time, reaching potential recruits has gotten harder. With the proliferation of cable TV channels and the growth of the Internet, simply running television ads during college football games and on full-page spreads in Sports Illustrated can be costly and incomprehensive ways to get the message to the desired audience.

In contrast, ads for the Guard's iTunes promotion are less expensive and have run on hundreds of Web sites frequented by young people. (Music.com, Billboard.com and the Web site for Fry's Electronics are examples.) Each download costs the government between 90 cents and a dollar, Jones said. That's much cheaper than more traditional giveaways of hats and T-shirts, which can cost $3 per item plus delivery charges.

"My responsibility is to get the best bang for the buck out of what we are entrusted with," Jones said.

Let's face it. The kids are certainly a lot smarter than the military brass here. If they realize they can download free music at the military's expense, then they certainly are taking advantage of it and still refuse to join up. They are obviously going to be contacted by a military recruiter anyways--considering the recruiters can get their information through either the high schools or Selective Service registrations. And these kids probably also have some idea of the mess that's going on in Iraq--otherwise, why would we see recruitment numbers going down.

Now it is certainly true that the online ads for the military is going to be a lot cheaper than giving away hats and t-shirts, which are more expenseive. And it will probably take fewer enlistments to pay for these online ads than for the hats and t-shirts. But the military has got one big problem that they cannot solve--they are bogged down in an increasingly unpopular Iraq war with the American public. And no amount of free iTunes giveaways is going to solve this problem.