The Navy will award its lucrative recruitment advertising and marketing contract to Young & Rubicam, a New York-based advertising firm, after a 15-year run with Detroit-based Campbell Ewald, sources tell Navy Times.
"No official announcement has been made," said Cmdr. Chris Servello, spokesman for the chief of naval personnel, under which Navy Recruiting Command operates.
Servello wouldn't comment further on when the award would be made, noting that the contracting process is being done by a separate command — Fleet Logistics Center Norfolk, whose contracting department is in Philadelphia.
Still, the announcement is considered imminent, sources tell Navy Times. Neither Campbell Ewald or Young & Rubicam, would comment until the official announcement is made.
Because the service has yet to officially announce the deal, no details of the new contract's worth have been made public, but those in the industry expect the annual dollar value of the contract to be similar to the $85 million a year the Navy paid Campbell Ewald for this past year's recruiting ads and marketing work.
That award, which came last May as the last contract expired, extended the terms of the contract on a month-to-month basis.
Over its expected five-year life, the new contract could be worth upward of a half billion dollars to Young & Rubicam.
The move would also bring the agency responsible for Navy advertisements much closer to Navy Recruiting Command's front door. The command is based in Naval Support Activity Mid-South, in Millington, Tenn., just 20 miles north of Memphis, where Young & Rubicam subsidiary Burson-Marsteller is located.
The loss of the Navy contract would be devastating to Campbell Ewald, which has also seen clients like Chevrolet and Cadillac move on in recent years.
Campbell Ewald, first won the Navy's recruiting business in 2000, winning the contract again in 2005 and then again in 2009 after a mandated review was conducted into the work.
Navy sources tell Navy Times they expect Campbell Ewald to appeal the Navy's decision, as is their right under current contracting rules.
Campbell Ewald's first campaign, "Navy: Accelerate Your Life," was the Navy's recruiting slogan from 2001 until 2009.
It was replaced by the unpopular "America's Navy — A global force for good," which had a run in all Navy advertising campaigns until last fall when it was removed from Navy recruiting commercials over a period of several months. It was gone when, during the Army-Navy football game in December, the service debuted a new recruiting commercial, "The Shield," a 30-second spot that ended simply with "America's Navy."
Another commercial, "Pin Map," which debuted Jan. 23 and featured huge red spheres in the air, over land and over oceans — later revealed as push pins in a world map showing the service's global presence — also ended with "America's Navy."
So the Navy doesn't have a single slogan, but service officials said last December that Campbell Ewald had done focus groups with the fleet, as well as with retires and veterans, trying to tease out new themes.
The service could go forward, officials said then, with multiple recruiting tag lines customized to individual commercial campaigns targeting specific audiences, rather than the older single-brand approach.
Mark D. Faram is a former reporter for Navy Times. He was a senior writer covering personnel, cultural and historical issues. A nine-year active duty Navy veteran, Faram served from 1978 to 1987 as a Navy Diver and photographer.
