The Idea: The greatest weapon in the Marine Corps' arsenal is the fighting spirit found inside each and every Marine.
This massive campaign launched over the course of a month with 120+ pieces of unique creative, telling a continuing story through targeting and retargeting.
All of our work led up to The Marines Corps’ first-ever Super Bowl commercial. There are no actors, just Marines; and those Marines are doing the jobs they normally would do during an actual mission. Everything from how and where bombs are dropped to exactly how far vehicles would be spaced from each other needed to be 100% accurate down to the finest detail.
We paired our television spot with an anthemic longer form piece of content that ran online (and a fan-favorite of active duty and veteran Marines).
Before earning the title of Marine, each prospect must overcome battles from within. They must cast aside doubt, fear, adversity, hesitation and division to win our nation's battles.
This series of Marine POV videos, brought to life their inner monologues, psyching themselves up for the upcoming battle.
We created platform-specific versions, taking into consideration best practices, like adding supers to Facebook videos, or a vertical aspect ratio for Instagram Stories (where we added different perspectives of the same scene).
Over the course of a month, we told a continuing story of what it takes to win our Nation's battles. We paid off our base’s continued engagement by launching our Super Bowl spot a day early through Facebook Live.
To help amplify our launch moment during Super Bowl LII we took advantage of key moments during the game and posted original content that aligned our fighting spirit with what was happening in real time.
To maximize our reach at launch, we created a unique :15 launch spot just for Twitter and promoted it with their 1st-view offering. We had over a 75% video view rate with over a 90% completion rate.
A Director's Cut… but with Marines. We had the Marines from the commercial explain what it's like to be a Marine and how what is happening in the commercial would actually go down.
Because at it's core, this was recruiting campaign, we wanted to add additional context to what life in the Corps is like, so we held live chats on Facebook Live with the Marines featured in our content.
Doug D’Arrigo - Executive Creative Director
Brian Steele - ACD Copy (TV Only)
Andrea Overstreet - Sr Art Director (Everything but TV)
Taylor Christmas - Copywriter (Everything but TV)
The Marine Corps is no ordinary brand. How we advertise and where is always going to be open for debate, so an AP news story was released about our launch and our client made the rounds on the Sunday morning news shows promoting it. I will never forgive him for making me watch Fox News.