The MullenLowe Ad Agency’s Half-a-Billion-Dollar Mandate to Reverse the Pentagon’s Recruiting Woes

The US government hires a marketing firm used to pushing luxury cars, ranch dressing, and beer to get America’s youth back to basic training

As this publication documented in March, the US military is struggling to meet its annual recruiting targets, prompting a mad scramble in Washington over the most effective ways of ensuring that young Americans keep enlisting.  

The nation’s lawmakers have supplied plenty of tone-deaf reasons for these lagging figures. The truth, however, is that people are waking up to the atrocities of the Pentagon’s war machine and are increasingly unwilling to risk serious injury or death by fighting wars in countries that have never attacked the US and pose no threat to themselves or their families.

Last fall, Joint Advertising Marketing Research & Studies, a program run by the Department of Defense (DoD), asked individuals aged 16-24 why they were hesitant to join the military. According to the government’s own research, more than 65% of responders indicated that the possibility of PTSD, injury, or death, was their top reason for avoiding military service.

The military offers career options in fields such as engineering, healthcare, or IT, and few of the individuals who sign up will ever see combat. Nevertheless, after watching their parents and older siblings go through the War on Terror, serving remains a commitment fewer and fewer high school graduates are willing to make.

Last fall, the Army National Guard was expected to miss its recruiting target by roughly 6,000 soldiers, while the Air National Guard was slated to be short by around 3,000 applicants. The army ended up missing its goal of recruiting 60,000 individuals by approximately 25%. This year, the Army is expected to come up about 10,000 recruits short. It’s becoming quite clear that people are growing tired of shipping their children off to die in offensive, profit-driven conflicts that have nothing to do with US security and everything to do with the State Department’s imperialist agenda.

The government has responded not by listening to its citizens, but by hiring a marketing agency to combat the declining interest in military service.

Earlier this fall, MullenLowe announced that it had been awarded a $454.6 million contract by the Defense Human Resources Activity, which is an arm of the DoD. MullenLowe is a full-service marketing agency owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies.

According to the DoD’s announcement on September 28, the contract is intended “for joint advertising, market research and studies marketing communication services. This contract provides for brand planning, identifying target markets, design and development of creative content, conducting and administrating national multi-media advertising campaigns and maintaining and operating website properties.”

In other words, the government wants to sell the wars we fight much in the same way that Corporate America sells the products we buy.

After all, McDonald’s doesn’t just sell hamburgers. The organization spends billions each year running spots about employees watching their co-worker open his/her college acceptance letter, grandfathers reminiscing about bringing their kids to the restaurant, while watching their now grown kids do the same with their own. The company showcases its philanthropic efforts and takes pride in its commitment to LGBTQ acceptance, support of veterans and hatred of police brutality. McDonald’s Corporation [NYSE:MCD] has revenue and earnings per share analyst expectations to beat every quarter and advertising how good their food tastes isn’t enough anymore. It’s not just a place to buy a hamburger; it’s the springboard for career development, a place to create lifelong memories with your family, and an institution for social change. It isn’t any of those things, really, but the marketing strategy isn’t about painting an accurate picture of the experience of visiting a McDonald’s restaurant. It’s about getting people in the door.

This is the approach the military has opted to pursue.

To that end, it’s hired the organization that crafted KFC’s That’s Finger Lickin’ Good campaign.

Who could forget the spot featuring Andy Sandberg and Snoop Dogg sharing Coronas on the beach? MullenLowe was responsible for that one too.

MullenLowe has used its experience of selling fast food and beer to also market military enlistment to American families. On its website, the agency boasts of its previous efforts of combatting parental objections to service as well as its dissemination of pro-military literature in 93% of US high schools.

Over the last two years, corporate news outlets have churned out countless think pieces about the establishment’s desire to reverse this trend.

They’re all very similar but one quote in an article published by The War Horse this summer stands out.

In July, the publication – which describes itself as “the most trusted source for bulletproof reporting on the human impact of military service” – ran a piece about the all-volunteer force. In it, the site quoted Katherine Kuzminski, the director of the military, veterans, and society program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

“[T]his is a generation of kids who’s been marketed to their entire lives, tied to the fact that they’ve been on screens, so they can kind of smell B.S. a lot better than previous generations,” Kuzminski told the site.

“That means fully rethinking the sales pitches that have worked for the last half century,” The War Horse went on.

The American public experiences these sales pitches on a daily basis.

When speaking about what our troops are doing in places like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, most members of the corporate press prefer to lean on scripted clichés about “fighting for our country” and “protecting our freedom.”

The US is a country that can’t even start a football game without a military flyover. These gestures may appear organic, but they are actually anything but. Rather than a natural outpouring of patriotic pride, the tributes to soldiers and the military that come before NFL games are actually sponsored by the Pentagon.

In 2015, Senator John McCain blasted the league for the arrangement, telling ESPN in May of that year that “it’s really disgraceful that NFL teams whose profits are at an all-time high had to be paid to honor our veterans.”

It was reported that the DoD paid $5.4 million to 14 NFL teams, from 2011 to 2014, for a variety of flag-draped pregame rituals. According to a report by McCain and fellow Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, the DoD secured similar deals with Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and Major League Soccer. There’s no indication that such a financial agreement still exists between the Pentagon and the league, however, much of the nationalistic fervor we’ve witnessed prior to kickoff has been manufactured by the Armed Forces.

Leaving the movie theater also often coincides with a release of patriotic endorphins for many Americans. That’s not an accident either.

In an op-ed earlier in the year, Washington Post columnist Max Boot noted the net benefit to recruiting “in the 1980s when patriotism surged and popular culture began to depict the military in a more positive light — we went from “The Deer Hunter” (1978) to “Top Gun” (1986).”

What Boot fails to mention is that this sudden shift in Hollywood’s tone was the result of literal, coordinated, government-sponsored propaganda. Via several in-depth reports, MintPress News reporter Alan MacLeod showed that there’s been absolutely nothing accidental or organic about the mainstream film industry’s overwhelmingly positive depiction of the military over the past few decades.

In what MacLeod has referred to as “an explicit quid pro quo,” the Pentagon has spent years providing its facilities, equipment, and personnel to the country’s top film studios in exchange for final approval of their scripts.

It’s an agreement which benefits both parties. Hollywood is able to save millions related to the costs of procuring pricey military-grade equipment, while the government ensures that content which paints the military, its global operations, or its history, in a negative light never makes it to the screen.

One of the central figures in this decades-long arrangement has been Phil Strub, the Pentagon’s Hollywood liaison between 1988 and 2018. Often credited with little more than “Special Thanks,” Strub has contributed significantly to films like “Iron Man,” “I Am Legend,” “Apollo 13,” and “Black Hawk Down,” and documents show he’s rewritten many others to reflect the Pentagon’s preferred messaging and objectives.

As MacLeod has written about last year’s box-office hit “Top Gun: Maverick,” "documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the movie was made only after an agreement was signed between Hollywood and the Pentagon, "... with the Navy insisting on “weav[ing] in” their “key talking points” in exchange for granting the production company extensive access to military hardware."

The advertising we’re exposed to is a big part of this multi-pronged national effort.

As it’s done for years, MullenLowe will use the hundreds of millions of dollars it’s just secured from the government to continue to market military service much in the same way the agency markets Midol, Scotts Turf Builder, E*Trade, and TJ Maxx.