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Events become front lines for recruiting

By TERRY LEFTON
Staff writer

Published November 22, 2010 : Page 18

http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article.printArticle&articleId=67424

It's not hard to find a representation of American soldiers at work. Push your TV remote enough times and you'll invariably find U.S. soldiers battling. Ah, but building a model of life in the Army that's modular enough to fit in a footprint that can vary by as much as tenfold -- that's no easy task.

Try coordinating a handful of different Army Strength in Action tours, each of which takes a squadron of semis to haul it around to between 300 and 400 events a year. Because of overlap, the Army claims 136 weeks of activation over an especially busy 52-week period.

That kind of massive logistical challenge sounds like a job for the infantry, or Army Corps of Engineers. For the past five years, however, it's been Momentum Worldwide building and coordinating the Army's mobile marketing tours.

Those tours deploy alongside NASCAR and NHRA tracks, where they are supported by the Army's sponsorship of drivers Ryan Newman and Tony Schumacher; visit spring-break locations, such as Panama City, Fla., and South Padre Island, Texas; or set up at high schools and various other events, including state fairs.

At the largest rollouts, erected at events such as the Daytona 500, the Strength in Action Tour has a 10,000-square-foot footprint. It has Strength of Body, Strength of Technology, Strength of Team and Strength to Lead elements. Participants engage in activities including an Apache helicopter flight simulator; a rock-climbing wall; and a robotics exercise, in which participants guide a "droid" through an obstacle course.

To gain entrance, participants must provide information and scan a driver's license, after which they get radio-frequency ID tags. That arms approaching recruiters (sometimes as many as 20 are on-site) with plenty of information as they try to sell an Army career, while escorting potential recruits through the exercises.

Smaller versions of the Army exhibit make frequent visits to high schools, where students compete against each other in a series of relay competitions.

Equipped with tablet PCs, the recruiters can approach someone who's already indicated an interest in technology when registering and whet his or her appetite by dropping "Did you knows?" like "the average U.S. Army soldier has $17,000 worth of equipment with him when he's in the field" or "there are 150 different career-path opportunities within the Army."

In an age of widespread attention deficits, real and imagined, the temptation is to measure everything in terms of "stickiness." Consequently, a favorite statistic from those working on the Army's mobile recruitment marketing is that the average time spent within the Strength in Action Tour is 28 minutes.

The largest activations can cost hundreds of thousands -- all aimed at generating what any sales organization craves: qualified leads. In the case of the Army, that's a 17- to 24-year-old man or woman, whose career path is uncertain.

"Awareness is not an issue for us; we've been around for 235 years," said Bruce Jasurda, chief marketing officer for the U.S. Army Accessions Command. "There just isn't that much opportunity anymore for young people to interact with a working soldier. So we provide that."

You can't quite enlist at Strength In Action tours and get the obligatory GI head shave, but potential soldiers at least get a taste of the Army. They can learn about different Army career paths and, if they are so inclined, can complete an enlistment interview and the standard enlistment screening test. Any actual sign-up would require a visit to a recruitment office.

The decisions to enlist can take six months to a year and only three in 10 applicants qualify.

"We're the ultimate considered purchase decision," Jasurda said. "It's a life decision, not a lifestyle decision. But because only 1 percent of the [U.S.] population has served, we still get very basic questions like, 'Will we live in Quonset huts' and 'Am I allowed to be married and be in the Army.'"

It's all about getting in potential recruits' faces -- in a good way.

"More than any other account, face-to-face engagement is vital for the Army," said Tanya Kesmodel, Momentum vice president, whose work on the account included a mini basic training crash course and a parachute jump with the Army's Golden Knights.

Kesmodel said that over the past five years, recruitment targets have varied from 100,000 to 150,000 and they also have been met or exceeded every year. Last year, the Army enlisted 107,000 recruits.

A slightly smaller experiential campaign targets high school students. At racetracks or even at the schools themselves, the Army School Challenge pits schools and students against each other in a series of relay competitions that test mental and physical skills. They include a small obstacle course and figuring how to do a "team push-up" in which each student's feet are placed at a right angle on the shoulders of one another.

Used in conjunction with NASCAR and NHRA events, the attraction can be quite compelling.

"It's really vital for potential recruits to talk with officers and get a real idea of what Army life is about," said Tom Boccuzzi, senior vice president and group director of business leadership at Momentum. "The drivers are great athletes and a big draw, but they also allow us to show that the team-orientation of what they do is very similar to the teamwork that makes the Army work."

For more information contact: Tanya.Kesmodel@Momentumww.com