GAO: Defense lacks data to measure success of ad campaigns

The Defense Department doesn't have enough information to measure the success of military recruiting campaigns, according to a new report from the General Accounting Office.

Over the past five years, the Pentagon has almost doubled the amount of money it spends on advertising and marketing, the report (GAO-03-1005) said. Defense spent $299 million on marketing military service opportunities in fiscal 1998, compared with $592 million between fiscal 1998 and fiscal 2003. Spending priorities also shifted, with an increasing portion of advertising dollars going to events marketing, public relations and Internet ads and a decreasing amount being spent on television campaigns.

The military's active and reserve components are currently meeting their recruiting goals-an improvement over the early 1990s, when most of the services failed to reach their targets, according to GAO. An overhaul of the Defense marketing strategy may be partly responsible for the turnaround, but the department has not developed a way to measure the full extent of the overhaul's impact, the report said.

Defense also lacks the data to determine whether extra advertising dollars translate into more successful recruiting, according to GAO.

For instance, Defense has not consistently collected data on the public's awareness of military ads and the willingness of potential recruits to consider joining the services. These are two areas where the Pentagon could collect information that might help gauge advertising's influence on recruitment, GAO said.

The Pentagon should set "clear, measurable advertising objectives for its advertising programs and develop outcome measures to evaluate the performance of its advertising programs," GAO recommended. But the watchdog agency acknowledged that will not be easy.

"Isolating the impact of advertising on recruiting efforts is inherently difficult because joining the military is a profound life decision influenced by many factors, including the opportunities available in college or in the job market," the report said.

The Defense Department plans to follow GAO's recommendations, according to Charles Abell, principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness. Defense is working on a "strategic framework" for advertising that will help managers "monitor results and make fact-based decisions," Abell said in a Sept. 2 memo responding to GAO's suggestions. The framework will apply at a department level, though the services branches will continue to develop their own marketing plans as well.

But Abell cautioned that it might take a while for Defense to fully develop a method that fully captures advertising's impact on recruiting. "Measuring advertising effectiveness is a challenge for all businesses, let alone for Defense with its unique set of characteristics," he said. "Current research has not advanced to the point where models exist that adequately account for the many factors that impact recruiting," he said.