US Army Documents Outline Multi-Million Dollar Recruitment Drive Built Around Call Of Duty

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As you may well know, the United States Army isn’t above using video games to help recruit new soldiers into its ranks with its first-person shooter series America’s Army getting multiple sequels since it first launched in 2002. The US Armed Forces branch was also apparently looking to take advantage of the Call of Duty franchise’s popularity to bolster its ranks.

According to documents acquired by Vice, the US Army had cooked up a multi-million-dollar recruitment drive to target “Gen Z Prospect” aged 18-24 years old with a focus on recruiting females, Black, and Hispanics. The funds were supposed to be used to pay Call of Duty content creators to create original videos that would showcase “the wide range of skillsets offered by the Army” and sponsor COD esports events but most of the ideas were scrapped when the video game community was rocked by the Activision Blizzard scandals back in 2021.

The US Army had also reportedly allocated roughly $3 million in funds to sponsor esports team OpTic Chicago, who it had previously worked with on various online content, and for ad spending on the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Esports League, IGN, WWE, G4, and Paramount+.

“Army Marketing’s goal for sponsorship is similar to all our advertising purchases which is to reach a specific market in support of Army recruiting,” a US Army spokesperson told Vice. “Ad recall and favorability are important as they are both industry accepted measures of effectiveness of the advertising and sponsorships we purchase. In Army marketing, we must meet the youth where they are and that is online.”