As part of its efforts to meet yearly recruitment goals for the military, DOD requested almost $575 million in fiscal year 2017 to conduct advertising intended to increase awareness of military service and ultimately generate leads for potential recruits. Senate Report 114-49 included a provision for GAO to assess DOD's advertising activities. This report examines the extent to which DOD (1) has coordinated advertising activities among the military service components, (2) has followed commercial best practices to assess the effectiveness of advertising activities, and (3) has oversight of its components' advertising activities. GAO identified best practices for assessing the effectiveness of advertising in consultation with advertising industry experts and reviewed DOD and service policies and the most recent version of each military service components' advertising plans, from fiscal years 2014-16.

Recruiting an all-volunteer military is a formidable task. To successfully enlist one eligible recruit, the Army must contact approximately 120 young people. The National Research Council explores the various factors that will determine whether the military can realistically expect to recruit an adequate fighting force-one that will meet its upcoming needs. It also assesses the military's expected manpower needs and projects the numbers of youth who are likely to be available over the next 20 years to meet these needs. With clearly written text and useful graphics, Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth offers an overview of important issues for military recruiters, touching on a number of important topics including: sex and race, education and aptitude, physical and moral attributes, and military life and working conditions. In addition, the book looks at how a potential recruit would approach the decision to enlist, considering personal, family, and social values, and the options for other employment or college. Building on the need to increase young Americans' "propensity to enlist," this book offers useful recommendations for increasing educational opportunities while in the service and for developing advertising strategies that include concepts of patriotism and duty to country. Of primary value to military policymakers, recruitment officers, and analysts, Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth will also interest social scientists and policy makers interested in youth trends.

As part of its efforts to meet yearly recruitment goals for the military, the Department of Defense (DOD) requested almost $575 million in FY 2017 to conduct advertising intended to increase awareness of military service and ultimately generate leads for potential recruits. This report examines the extent to which DOD (1) has coordinated advertising activities among the military service components; (2) has followed commercial best practices to assess the effectiveness of advertising activities; and (3) has oversight of its components' advertising activities. Tables and figures. This is a print on demand report.

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.

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.

This document describes the formulation and execution of a DoD-sponsored field experiment to test the effect of advertising on enlistments under alternative budget levels. It reports the research findings and addresses their potential budget implications. The DoD Advertising Mix Test, implemented as an experiment in Fiscal Year (FY) 1984, revealed that those geographic areas subject to an approximate 40-percent budget reduction in total advertising produced enlistment results equal to, and occasionally better than, other geographic areas unaffected by budget reductions. Moreover, in explaining the enlistment performance of those geographic areas subject to large total budget reductions, differences in the share of the total budget allocated to Joint advertising appear to be a contributing factor. The research findings suggest that the pattern of growth in Service-specific advertising during the past decade need not continue and could be reversed without adverse impact on recruiting.