This campaign started life as a brief for one 30 second radio ad to run alongside an existing TV commercial from a previous agency…

But this was one of JWT’s first pieces of work on the business, and we felt it was an opportunity to produce something worthy of The Army’s advertising heritage. After all, anything that ends with ‘Be the best’ surely has to be the best itself.

We personally persuaded the client that it was near impossible to convince a young man to ‘sign up’ in just a 30 second radio ad, and that we should engage them in a more relevant and current way offering a much longer conversation and insight into what modern day army life is really like.

We travelled to Catterick Barracks, Yorkshire, to spend 3 days with some trainee Infantry soldiers to identify someone who our target market could relate to and feel was genuine.

Then through regular interviews and live exercise recordings (sent back from their platoon commanders) we produced not 1 but 21 separate radio commercials edited and aired every other day for 6 weeks, tracking the live progress of our recruit.

We backed this up with facebook posts from Recruit Quinn, to co-incide with the radio broadcasts, along with pictures, videos, links and information on what he had been up to and what he was about to do in the coming days.

At the end of the campaign we also made podcasts of his entire broadcasts available for people to download online, so that they could listen, digest, and decide if basic training and a career in the army was really for them.