Military Recruiting: DOD Needs to Establish Objectives and Measures to Better Evaluate Advertising's Effectiveness

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.

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.