Corps Expands Female Recruiting Effort

Actually, they'll take as many as they can get. Faced with the difficulty of recruiting during a long and unpopular war, the Marines have started marketing themselves to women in a concerted way for the first time. It is running ads in magazines like Shape, Self and Fitness, which appeal mainly to female readers, as well as through more mainstream outlets like "American Idol," where the message is a unisex one of patriotism rather than macho swagger.

The Marines still run their traditional ads - during basketball and hockey games, and in magazines like Sports Illustrated and Men's Fitness - often showing male recruits parachuting from airplanes, wielding big guns, driving heavy tanks and stampeding across the ground.

But now the company is also showing a softer side. In the latest campaign, a print ad shows a female marine striking a martial arts pose in front of a crowd of men who are looking up to her as their leader. The tag line: "There are no female marines. Only marines."

The campaign is a big departure for the Marines, which started accepting women for clerical duties in 1918 but until last year had advertised to them only fitfully. During World War II, the most memorable recruitment ads aimed at women came from the U.S. Army and Navy. In 1973, when the military dropped the draft in favor of a volunteer force, the Marines introduced its "few good men" slogan and ran at least one spot for women, reaching out to high school graduates and "college gals" with a brochure that had a picture of a flower on it.

In the 1990s, when the Marines were having trouble reaching recruitment goals, they ran a scattering of print ads in magazines like Seventeen and Sports Illustrated for Women, using tag lines like "You can look at models, or you can be one" and "Get a makeover that's more than skin deep." That outreach "wasn't as sophisticated as it is now," said Jay Cronin, management director of JWT, which has been the Marines' advertising agency for more than 60 years.

Cronin said the current effort was much different because everyone involved took the time to "understand the psychographics," figuring out which women might actually want to join the military, and why. That is why the campaign targets athletic women, not just all women graduating from high school, and the messages conveyed are much more egalitarian.

Although most combat jobs are off-limits to women, they make up 6.2 percent of the Marines and go through the same basic training as men.

"We had never done much female outreach," said Lieutenant Colonel Mike Zeliff, assistant chief of staff for marketing and advertising for the Marines in Quantico, Virginia. "But there was an opportunity for us to go after the athletic, young woman who would be well suited to graduate from boot camp. We asked ourselves, 'What can we do to get the message out to these young women?' "

Given the drumbeat of bad news from the lingering conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, where American military casualties just topped the 4,000 mark, the sell can be a tough one. Anti-recruiting sentiment has flared on some school campuses, as well as in Berkeley, California, where the city council voted in February to ask Marine recruiters to vacate their downtown office.

Dana Balicki, national media coordinator for CodePink, a women's peace group, called the Marines campaign "just another example of potentially misleading tactics used to sell the war to young people, and especially young women."

Talking specifically about the print ad that shows a woman in a leadership role, Balicki said, "she's supposed to look like she's being empowered, but she's in a typical self-defense stance. After knowing the statistics and talking to women who have experienced sexual trauma or violence in the military, it's hard to think of it as empowerment."

All branches of the military have been reaching out to nontraditional audiences, but none has done so quite so emphatically as the Marines, whose advertising budget is $157 million this year, up from $152 million in fiscal year 2007.

The targeted campaigns were created by JWT, a unit of WPP Group. The ad featuring a woman commander is meant to appeal to girls and young women who are weary of being separated from boys and men in sports and are eager to prove themselves on a larger stage, said Marshall Lauck, JWT's lead executive on the Marines account.

"The message is that the Marine Corps offers a unique opportunity to earn that title and be shoulder-to-shoulder with your male counterparts," Lauck said. "That's an important aspect for the young women seeking that challenge, women seeking an opportunity for a great and selfless endeavor."

The effect of the publicity is difficult to measure. There has been a small increase in the number of female recruits - to 2,507 in 2007, from 2,282 in 2005 and 2,320 in 2006 - but the Marines say they are particularly pleased by the volume of responses to the campaign. The magazine ads include perforated reply cards, and according to Steve Harding, a partner at the Marine's media agency, they yielded more than 1,044 "qualified leads" in 2007, though only two of them turned into signed contracts.

One is Ana Castillo, a senior at William Chrisman High School from Independence, Missouri, who mailed in a reply card last September after seeing an ad in a women's fitness magazine in the waiting room of a doctor's office. Her older brother is a navy veteran, and while she had been seriously considering joining the military, the ad prompted her to take action.

"The Marines are the toughest," she said by telephone. "They have the longest boot camp, the highest standards. The Marines want people to actually want to be in the Marines, not just be in it for the money."

It was those traits that Castillo saw reflected in the magazine ad, as well as in the words of the recruiter who called her a week after she mailed the reply card. She will turn 18 on June 24 and plans to leave for boot camp on July 7, after her high school graduation.