For several years, the Canadian Forces have urged the populace to ‘Fight’ with them. But with a deficit of skilled trades and a need for trained professionals, the military is now reaching out to Canadians looking for a new challenge in their work.
The campaign, ‘Priority Occupations,’ launched last week with debut of six TV spots, each in French and English, across conventional and specialty TV. Creative and media planning were handled by Montreal-based BCP, while media was purchased by Cossette.
A digital strategy will start next week with the rollout of an online rich-media buy focusing on job-hunting sites such as JobBoom.com, and the seeding of six four- to-six-minute web shorts. A print buy is rolling out in trade media such as Canadian Consulting Engineer and Canadian Aviator. The campaign also includes OOH by way of transit shelters nationally, a strategy meant to catch people’s eyes as they go to and from work.
The target demo for Canadian Forces recruitment is 18- to 34-year-olds, male and female, but the previous ‘Fight’ campaign really targeted 18- to 24-year-old males, Thomas Lecordier, AGM at Montreal-based BCP, tells MiC. While it has been considered a success in terms of generating awareness and driving recruitment, he says, the data also revealed that they were not quite reaching the second half of that target demo, the 25- to 34-year-olds.
This is a demographic that is already in the workforce, Lecordier says, so the goal behind the new campaign was to let people who might be thinking about a career change know that the Canadian Forces offers many of the same professional, non-fighting opportunities as the private sector.
‘We really want to put the Canadian Forces job opportunities at the same level as any great employer in the country,’ he explains.
The campaign creative focuses on six key occupations (air traffic controller, aircraft technician, artillery soldier, mechanic, electronic technician and sonar operator) with creative that shows people in their military workplace with quotes from each person saying what they liked about their jobs.
