Military Recruiting: DOD Needs to Establish Objectives and Measures to Better Evaluate Advertising's Effectiveness
Highlights
The Department of Defense (DOD) must convince more than 200,000 people each year to join the military. To assist in recruiting, the military services advertise on television, on radio, and in print and participate in other promotional activities. In the late 1990s, some of the services missed their overall recruiting goals. In response, DOD added recruiting resources by increasing its advertising, number of recruiters, and financial incentives. By fiscal year 2003, DOD's total recruiting budget was approaching $4 billion annually. At the request of Congress, GAO determined the changes in DOD's advertising programs and funding trends since the late 1990s and assessed the adequacy of measures used by DOD to evaluate the effectiveness of its advertising. GAO recommends that DOD set clear, measurable advertising
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Department of Defense | To improve DOD's ability to adequately measure the impact of its advertising programs on its recruiting mission, the Secretary of Defense should direct the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness to issue guidance that would (1) set clear, measurable objectives for DOD's advertising programs; (2) develop outcome measures for each of DOD's advertising programs that clearly link advertising program performance with these objectives; and (3) use these outcome measures to monitor the advertising programs' performance and make fact-based choices about advertising funding as part of the overall recruiting investment in the future. |
Closed – Implemented
The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness has been engaged in research to develop models to measure the effectiveness of advertising. The National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Youth Population and Military Recruitment has completed its publication addressing an evaluation framework for advertising and recruiting. In addition, DOD has contracted with RAND's National Defense Research Institute to study how best to evaluate the effectiveness of military advertising.
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