The Army be thuggin' it

The military is teaming up with hip-hop bible the Source to recruit black urban kids with pimped-out Hummers and off-da-hook merchandise.

By Whitney Joiner

Oct. 17, 2003 | Three times a week, 48 weeks a year, a four-man team drives a huge yellow Hummer to a different location. It might be a college or high school campus, a major fraternity gathering, an NAACP event, MTV's Spring Break, or BET's Spring Bling: If lots of African-American teens will be there, the Hummer wants to be there, too.

Spray-painted with patriotic images (a rippling American flag, a smiling white woman in a U.S. military officer's uniform), the yellow Hummer is the signature vehicle for the U.S. Army's "Taking It to the Streets" campaign, a hip-hop-flavored tour launched a year ago by Vital Marketing Group, the Army's African-American events marketing team. During these events, the Taking It to the Streets team lets possible recruits hang out in the Hummer, where they can try out the multimedia sound system or watch Army recruitment videos. The Army's team often throws contests, too: Which possible recruit can shoot the most baskets, do the most push-ups, go up the rock-climbing wall the fastest? The winners are awarded Army-branded trucker hats, throwback jerseys, wristbands and headbands. Want a customized dog tag? They've got a machine that makes them. Want to see what it's like to fly a plane? There's a flight simulator.

It's all to convince urban teens that the Army understands hip-hop culture: The Army knows you play basketball and wear jerseys, because the Army is down with the streets.

"You have to go where the target audience is," says Col. Thomas Nickerson, director of strategic outreach for the U.S. Army Accessions Command, who says that the Army just reached its recruitment goal of 100,200 enlistees this year. "Our research tells us that hip-hop and urban culture is a powerful influence in the lives of young Americans. We try to develop a bond with that audience. I want them to say, 'Hey, the Army was here -- the Army is cool!'"

But critics say that the Army's co-optation of hip-hop in its streetwise campaign is misleading, because it markets a life-changing and possibly life-threatening commitment as a fun, cool consumer choice. And some, like Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), who argued for a reinstatement of the draft in January, voice concerns about the overrepresentation of people of color in the Army.

"One of the reasons why I advocated the draft is because, in terms of a national crisis, we should have shared sacrifices," Rangel says. "When the government says we have to stay in Iraq, we have to show that we're prepared to lose lives, the 'we' should be a broad cross-section of America. They're not asking all of America: They've targeted those Americans who are not getting a fair shake in our society."

African-Americans and Hispanics are consistently overrepresented in the armed forces. Even though the numbers have evened out a bit this year, the 2003 Army is 16 percent black, compared with 11 percent of the country, and 13.4 percent Latino, compared with 11 percent of the country.

The Vital Marketing Group is about to take its recruitment campaign for African-Americans a step further by teaming up with hip-hop bible the Source. This fall, Vital will launch a new tour separate from the Taking It to the Streets campaign: The Source Campus Combat Tour will start in late October, hitting five Northeastern college campuses with high percentages of African-American students. Like Taking It to the Streets, the Campus Combat Tour will feature interactive exhibits and physical challenges, but Campus Combat culminates in a grand MC battle judged by the Source's editors.

"When I saw the Source was teaming up with the Army, I was outraged," says Bakari Kitwana, former executive editor of the Source and author of "The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture." "It's a betrayal of their readership. The military has historically used African-Americans, while the country has not done justice to African-Americans."

Niche marketing to minorities is a recent development for the Army. Two years ago, the Army's newly hired advertising agency, Leo Burnett, threw out the stale 20-year-old "Be All You Can Be" tagline and replaced it with a jazzy new campaign called "Army of One." This heavily researched and focus-grouped motto -- emphasizing the Army's recognition of each soldier's individual talents -- and its accompanying advertising blitz are especially geared toward the short attention spans of the 72 million Generation Yers. "It's becoming really difficult to establish brand loyalty, because kids are bombarded with multiple messages," says Joseph Anthony, CEO of Vital. (According to American Demographics magazine, the average teen takes in 3,000 marketing messages a day.)

To compete with all the other brands vying for kids' attention, the Army launched a dynamic, interactive Web site with a strong cyberrecruiting team, multilingual chat rooms, a downloadable "America's Army: Operations" video game, and new commercials focused on Army skills that easily translate to civilian life. And there are Army of One campaigns tailored to specific groups. Muse Cordero Chin, the Los Angeles-based agency that heads up the African-American-geared ad campaign for Leo Burnett, will roll out print and TV ads predominantly featuring blacks early next year. (Muse works closely with Vital, which creates and markets the campaign's events.) San Antonio's Cartel Creativo has developed Spanish and English ads featuring Latin music for the Hispanic community. And for the past year the Army has sponsored a NASCAR car and recruited at races; the mostly white, rural NASCAR audience has already generated over 40,000 leads for the Army.

Next page: "We don't want to seem as if we're trying to buy our way into urban culture"