The US Army is mobilizing to quickly update its recruiting ads, after being forced to yank commercials that featured actor Jonathan Majors, in the wake of his arrest last Saturday on various assault charges.
ADVERTISEMENTThe US Army is mobilizing to quickly update its recruiting ads, after being forced to yank commercials that featured actor Jonathan Majors, in the wake of his arrest last Saturday on various assault charges.
The ads were originally set to air during the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association)'s Final Four basketball games this weekend, and the plans are to stick to the schedule.
Majors was brought on board as a narrator of the revived “Be All You Can Be” Army ads, a slogan which dominated its recruiting ads for two decades starting in 1981. The service hoped to capitalize on his popularity, thanks to his work in the recent Creed III and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania films, hoping that it would help them reach younger audiences.
They pulled the ads off the air when Majors was arrested in New York on charges of strangulation, assault and harassment. New York City police said the actor was involved in a domestic dispute with a 30-year-old woman. But a lawyer for Majors, Priya Chaudhry, has said there is evidence clearing Majors and that the actor “is provably the victim of an altercation with a woman he knows.”
The Army is spending more than $117 million (approx. €107 million) on its advertising buy for the “Be All You Can Be” campaign, which will be on social media, television and digital and physical billboards.
Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, head of Army marketing, recently stated that the Army has postponed ads or replaced them with other pre-existing commercials that were quickly updated.
“We are absolutely able to utilize a majority of what we have invested,” Fink said. “We think that we’ll have some brand new creative ads in time for the Women’s Final Four on Friday.”
“A majority of that content did not contain our main narrator… So we have a ton of content to go back to, to create basically new commercials new ads, if we need to,” said Fink. “The campaign is full steam ahead.”
Last year was the US Army’s worst recruiting year in recent history, falling 25% short of its goal to enlist 60,000 recruits.
