Army Tries Incel Marketing
Military recruitment embraces the vibe shift
The Army has released a piece of content…quite a piece of content indeed:
Why does this exist?
When the CIA went for woke ads, it got mocked for it.
“I am a woman of color. I am a mom. I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.” She is, we learn, a “Latina” and “daughter of immigrants” who will not accept “misguided patriarchal ideas.” We glimpse a framed photo of her with former CIA head John Brennan — a war criminal. She is “intersectional,” she says.
The pressure to stay relevant presses even clandestine services into the service of wokeness. But another pressure emanates from the heart of marketing, and I’m hoping it’ll save us from spiritual communism. That pressure is demographics.
Through the eyes of a professional propagandist, such as myself, the above video, called “Ghost in the Machine,” looks like an intentionally-mysterious recruitment “ad” meant to go viral among very online and probably right wing young men. “Bro…what even IS this?” they’re supposed to say, sharing the link on Discord or Telegram. “should we sign up…like fr.”
The clearest tell that it’s a well-orchestrated recruitment marketing campaign (amongst others discussed below)—probably created in secret by a very prominent and expensive ad agency—is the above-the-fold CTA on the YouTube video: “Join Us.” This evidences a campaign aimed at the conversion-stage of the customer funnel; conversions in this case measured sign ups to speak with a recruiter. But everything else about the video suggests that it’s targeting at a new kind of customer—one both vital to and ignored by existing Army communications.
4th Psychological Operations Group
It’s the only post on the new YouTube account of the 4th Psychological Operations Group of the US Army.
PSYOP Forces are Masters of Influence – the core of information warfare. We conduct influence activities to target psychological vulnerabilities and create or intensify fissures, confusion, and doubt in adversary organizations. We use all available means of dissemination – from sensitive and high tech, to low-tech, to no-tech, and methods from overt, to clandestine, to deception.
The video strikes an entirely different tone from the 8th Psychological Operations Group’s 2020 recruitment video:
This one is about as corny and repellant as it gets. There’s stock footage of a guy putting on a purple striped tie. It’s poorly lit and makes psyop work feel like an accounting office job plus guns and parachutes (which is probably closer to what it actually is). It was probably made in house, without any real strategy or customer research, by Army marketing people with little real (advertising) training or resources.
Clown World
The Ghost in the Machine video is made to look and feel like an extended version of the Joker trailer circa 2019.
It even has a man putting on makeup, an absolute tell that the Joker, and probably specifically this trailer, was a guidepost of the agency brief. In advertising, when the client’s instructions are coming through too strongly in your final product we say “your brief is showing,” and I think that occurs several times in this video, both with the clown makeup and also “born from the ashes of a world of war,” which is a historical brand point that probably appeared in the RTB (Reasons to Believe) section of the brief.
So why Joker trailer? Despite what we’ve seen in literally every other piece of recent military marketing, young white dudes still make up the overwhelming majority of Army personnel (yes, this campaign for only a small, elite part of the army, but all the more reason to experiment). Within that group, military service draws the slightly disaffected—often right leaning and suspicious of the media—who feel unsatisfied with daily life in their small town or city and turn to the internet for adventure and camaraderie.
The internet-breaking success of the masterpiece Joker trailer (and the less impressive film) among one of the Army’s core demographic recruitment targets—if not by far its most important—is impossible to deny. This fact triggered a lot of woke journalists, much to the joy 4chan which is still the central culture generator for the Joker demographic.
In the Army rip off, Koko the Clown, one of the original animated characters from the 1920s rotoscope era, sheds his skin, setting a creepy vibe and driving home the theme of the video, that the Army is the ghost in the machine dictating world events. “Who is pulling the strings?” it asks. “You’ll find us in the shadows,” it tells us, a pretty hilarious thing for a puppet master lurking in the shadows to say. It all feels a bit desperate, which perhaps the Army is.
But it made no fanfare about the video. It’s not on the website. It wasn’t shared on any official Twitter account. Beyond reducing risk of controversy, it’s also part of the show. This demographic increasingly feels like there’s a hidden leviathan working against them. “Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?” incites the Joker trailer. They’re immediately distrustful of the mainstream media and advertising, and rely on friends to filter information. The mysteriousness of the video—along with its high quality production values—is meant to pierce through the veil of suspicion.
It’s a very good strategy, and it worked. The video became the subject of long discussion threads on 4chan. One anon commented “this is made for us, but they underestimated how few f**ks we give.”
Hopeful Voyagers
When preparing a marketing campaign, we build what are called personas. Personas are character sketches of your target customers. Personas have demographic characteristics (e.g. age and income), as well as psychographic characteristics, e.g. what motivates them to buy certain things over others. We give personas labels—e.g. “the trendsetter” or “the enthusiast.” Sometimes even silly names “Sean Chao, 36, Seattle.”
An example: while working with a CPG client in the chip/snack space, I encountered my all time favorite persona, “Hopeful Voyagers,” a very nice way of describing a certain kind of woman, 24-46, who happily eats whatever crosses her path.
The persona in question is that of the ordinary flyover state Gen Z white boy—kids the media likes to paint in broad strokes as “incels” (whether or not they’re actually celibate, and unless they properly signal their wokeness with earrings and partially dyed hair). Young, white, right leaning, suspicious of mainstream media—probably the Army’s core recruitment targets since 1776. We can name him something like “Grayson, 22, Evanston, Wyoming” or “The Mediocre White Kid.” And if we know one thing about Grayson, boy did he love him some Joker.
Psychographically, Grayson believes he’s living in a clown world manipulated by shadowy forces. The Army, instead of saying that they’re fighting those forces, admits that they are those forces. “Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?” The Army answers in the affirmative. It positions itself as the the benevolent puppet master; one you should come work for, not be afraid of, which is a little like Big Tobacco positioning itself as the cure to smoking.
Psywar Soldiers
The video has 700k views, and if those are authentic viral views, then the campaign has absolutely been a success, especially given that the Army has yet to put a cut down of the video on TV. The video is gorgeous, interesting, and exciting to watch—a very difficult thing to put into the content stream without claiming credit. This kind of guerrilla marketing campaign, that stays gorilla without ever coming out of the shadows and selling you the t-shirt, is very rare. So kudos to whoever had the balls to stick with the plan.
On the other hand, it’s likely selling a false product.
Whether the Army is “bragging” or simply desperate for recruits, I don’t know. What is clear is that some marketing person pulled an insight (insights are the basis of all good marketing campaigns) out of an internal brand workshop. “Hey, these young Joker kids are obsessed with conspiracies. In a way, you are the conspiracy, right? What if you just owned it?”
But I would imagine the nature of this actual job, actually being a so-called Psywar Soldier, is a lot more like the second video than the first. You’re probably not pulling the strings of global affairs—more like “defending” woke propaganda distributed by your branch in whatever country you’re based in, if not in the US itself. The Ghost of Kiev, for example, was more or less revealed to be a psyop, and the Army Times suggests that this recruitment campaign funnels candidates towards similar work.
So these young guys could be effectively duped by good marketing only to find themselves truly in clown-mode, glorified “customer service intake specialists” on the frontlines of the clown empire the Joker was born to destroy. The “enemy,” whose “mind” the Army controls, may not be a foreign entity but the targets of the recruitment campaign themselves. Verbum Vincent.
> Psychological Operations Group
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sus
Cringe faggot zog commercial. They are not puppet masters, its much more disorganized than most would believe..