Low recruitment is due to tight labor markets---only unemployment solves.

The U.S. Army has a recruitment problem. In 2022, the service missed recruitment goals by 25% — the only armed service to do so. Now, the Army is bringing back a marketing campaign from the ’80s and ’90s in the hope that the rebranding can help bridge the gap.

The Army launched its “Be All You Can Be” campaign in March with a price tag of $117 million. Shortly afterward came the arrest of actor Jonathan Majors, who was featured in two marquee ads. The ads were pulled, and two new ones took their place.

Besides the television spots, the Army is hoping to take advantage of new tech infrastructure known as MarTech, which allows the service to track which marketing efforts actually lead to enlistments. Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, the Army’s chief of enterprise marketing, spoke with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about the technology.

Alex Fink: The nirvana within marketing is to be able to actually see a sale and then trace that sale back to a marketing activity. In fact, in 2019, we probably contracted around 120,000 soldiers across all three components, the Army, Army Reserve and the Army National Guard. We can only make an attribution of about 500 of those, so insignificant.

Kai Ryssdal: Wow.

Fink: We’ve made some significant investments over the years. And you know, we’re up around 40% of all enlisted contracts today. We can see what marketing activities that youth who actually signed a contract, what brought them in, what drew them in. And so that has obviously given us great insights into the type of content and the type of media that we use.

Ryssdal: All right. So look, you’ve got all this data. You can do the MarTech and all of that stuff. And yet still, the secretary of the Army said not too long ago, fiscal year ’22, you only met 75% of your recruiting goals. So you’ve got some challenges.

Fink: Right. And it’s a multifaceted challenge for sure. There’s things in the environment that the Army has little control of, there’s things that we have some control of and there’s some things we have a lot of control of. And the things that we have a lot of control of, like our brand and how we go to market, are in that category. And so, this is clearly one of many different things that the Army is trying to do to address the recruiting challenges.

Ryssdal: So here’s the thing you don’t really have control of: the American labor market. When you and I spoke in 2019, the labor market was tight. Here we are three years later, after a huge upheaval in the American economy, the labor market is still tight. How big a problem is that for you?

Fink: It’s always a challenge. A tight labor market, low unemployment always makes it harder to recruit. We could model in the past the effects of unemployment: Unemployment goes up, recruiting goes up. I wouldn’t count on that this time. That is because youth are in a very different place than they have been historically when it comes to any military service, in particular service in the Army.