Army on Everest

Background

The British Army wanted to tackle Everest the hard way - by the West Ridge. The brief was to use the resulting media attention and PR noise to make potential recruits more aware of the range of jobs and opportunities in the Army, to make them think differently about the army and to create a halo effect around other recruitment campaigns. The key aim was to establish and reinforce the thought: ‘The Army could offer me a fulfilling career and a lifestyle outside of the everyday’.

Idea

A unique TV ad campaign was created using live footage beamed off the mountain to give the style of a documentary and the feeling of rolling news urgency and interest. Press executions challenged people with the scale of the undertaking. An Interactive DAL sat behind the TV ads to provide more newsworthy and personal interest stories. Email (sent to approximately 60,000 people, who had previously shown an interest in the Army, but been too young to join) and online advertising drove traffic to www.armyoneverest.mod.uk where people could view more content about the expedition and find out about careers in the Army.

The emphasis in the online creative was on interactivity linked to the newsworthy nature of the campaign. The aim was for people to interact with the creative and get some idea of the physical and psychological challenge the Army faced. One banner ‘blew’ site visitors away while another caused people to struggle up the mountain. Expand banners and MPUs enabled viewers to explore Everest and provided rich content to people who would not normally visit an Army website or recruiting office. Video MPUs featured reports straight from Everest updated as footage was available and up to the minute news-feed banners told the latest events. Bespoke ads were created for specialist climbing sites using technical language incomprehensible to ordinary visitors.

Results

Despite the fact that only 70% of the campaign went out before the expedition was ended early due to the summit being unreachable, footage from Everest was shown on Sky News, and a documentary was aired on Bravo TV. The email campaign had a 24.55% open rate. The site achieved more than 500,000 unique visits, was featured on numerous blogs and received high exposure in the mainstream press. There has been a large uplift in the responses to the Infantry campaign and visits to the www.armyjobs.mod.uk website with an increase in applications and recruitment.

Target Audience

Men and women aged 16 to 32.

Our Thoughts

One of our favourite campaigns of recent months, this may not be as flashy or as funny as LynxJet, say, but my goodness it’s been cunningly put together. Think about it. Soldiers are getting shot every day in Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment. Recruits aren’t exactly tumbling in through the doors. So, instead of offering terror and death, why not offer excitement and adventure? You know you’re onto something when news media pick up on your story - so when Sky News reported on the expedition, the Publicis team must have been punching air.