Army brings back its successful “Be All You Can Be” campaign to boost recruiting

The U.S. Army is trying to catch lightning in a bottle for the second time by rolling out again its Be All You Can Be recruiting slogan which was very successful between the 1980s and 2000s.

The Army’s recruiting efforts are at a critical point having fallen far short of the service’s 2022 recruitment goal. The Army hopes that the new recruiting ads, which are aimed at a Gen Z audience, will have the same effect they did in 1981 when the service overcame recruitment shortages.

“The Army, at the end of the day, is here to fight and win the nation’s wars, and we wanted to reflect the Army that does that. And that’s the Army that I see when I go out and visit installations, whether it’s here or whether it’s overseas,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, who appears in one of the videos, said.

“These commercials were really based on the market research we’ve been doing about what do people think about the Army, what do they think they know, what don’t they know, and how do we start telling that story through these ads,” she added.

One of the released videos, titled Overcoming Obstacles, is a nice vignette of Army history. It shows the service from 1775 through the building of the Panama Canal, World War I trench warfare, and World War II’s D-Day to the present.

The video is narrated by actor Jonathan Majors, star of Creed III and Ant-Man and Wasp: Quantimania. The Army chose Majors because he resonates so well with the young people of Generation Z and comes from a military family with his father and grandfathers having all served in the armed forces.

“If you see obstacles ahead of you,” Majors says near the end of the video, “take a closer look at this force that’s been overcoming them for almost 250 years. Where you can draw strength from those beside you and make your history.”

The Army also released a 30-minute-long video showing Soldiers from different Military Occupational Specialties (MOSs) and units.

The Army spent $117 million on the new advertising campaign, according to Wormuth, and hopes that the new ads will show the Gen Z target audience that the service can provide opportunities they may not know about.

However, Wormuth stated that the Army’s lofty recruiting goal of 65,000 for 2023 is admittedly a “stretch goal.”

Army Chief of Staff General McConville hopes that the new ads will inspire new recruits to enlist. “We want to give everyone an opportunity to do one of the most important things they can in life,” he said. “And I think they’ll look back on their service and look back on it proudly.”

The relaunch of Be All You Can Be campaign comes a few years after The Calling ad campaign which featured animated videos that were widely panned and became a recruiting distraction.