This report examines whether advertising money is more efficiently allocated to Joint advertising or to Service-specific advertising (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines). This is done using data gathered in 1984 under the Department of Defense sponsored 'Advertising Mix Test' wherein a designed experiment varied the levels of joint and service-specific advertising across the U.S. and observed the number of recruits obtained. Previous studies have not considered the efficiency with which different entities conduct recruiting activities, and it is possible that a good program can be inefficiently run, or an inferior program can be efficiently run, thus leading to incorrect conclusions if efficiency is ignored. Here we show that in the test data design, the

This report presents the findings of quantitative research assessing the effectiveness of eight U.S. Military Service youth advertisements. The research was conducted by Wirthlin Worldwide in support of the Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Recruiting Advertising Program (JRAP). Eight Service-specific (Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines and Joint Recruiting) television advertisements were assessed using an advertising assessment model, strata. The television executions were evaluated on how they communicated the positioning strategy developed in the Youth VISTA Research and their success in communicating benefits of military service. One of the key findings of the Youth VISTA research was that respondents could not articulate specific attributes or benefits of military service. An effective communications strategy is based on attributes or benefits that underpin personal values, in this case the values that drive youth decision to join or not join the military. The strata research thus was designed to identify the means of communicating personal benefits in a manner that would be personally relevant and believable to youth.

It is anticipated that in the coming decade the Department of Defense (DoD) will field and test new advertising and recruiting initiatives designed to improve the recruiting outlook. The DoD needs a comprehensive research and evaluation strategy based on sound research principles that will ensure valid, reliable, and relevant results to discover the most promising policies. The primary objective of this book is to help the DoD improve its research on advertising and recruiting policies. Evaluating Military Advertising and Recruiting: Theory and Methodology presents a framework for evaluation that links different types of research questions to various research methodologies. The framework identifies four major categories of research questions and four broad methodological approaches. The first category of research question asks "What does a target audience see as attractive or unattractive features of a program?" It is well suited to examination via qualitative methods, such as focus groups, unstructured or open-ended surveys, and interviews. The second category of research question asks "What is the effect of a program on specified attitudes or behavioral intentions?" It is well suited to examination via surveys, experiments, and quasi experiments. The third category of research question asks "What is the effect of a proposed new program on enlistment?" It is well suited to examination via experiments and quasi experiments. The final category of research question asks "What is the effect of an existing program on enlistment?" It is well suited to examination via econometric modeling.

Advertising is one of the central recruiting tools used by the military services in support of the all-volunteer force. This Note analyzes the effects of advertising on recruiting, providing quantitative estimates of the relative effectiveness of Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and joint advertising programs. The findings indicate that, in general, the services gain enlistments from additional advertising, and the gains of any one branch do not seem to come at the expense (in terms of lost recruits) of any other. Not only are there no important interservice competitive effects of advertising, but the advertising done by a service apparently confers important benefits on the other branches as well. Consequently, both service and joint advertising appear to be powerful tools to help meet the recruiting requirements of the all-volunteer armed forces.

The Defense Department has been spending over $100 million annually on recruiting advertising. Previous econometric studies of military advertising's effects have relied on data from time periods unlike today's and have used models possibly inappropriate for supporting today's decisionmakers. This report details improved methods developed to assess military advertising's effectiveness and illustrates them using early 1980s and mid-1990s data.