Client +
The United States Marine Corps.

Situation +
I spent 4.5 years as designer, art director and associate creative director on the Marines account. With the country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan it had become increasingly difficult to recruit young men and women into the military. Additionally, since the last site was launched the generation being recruited as shifted from late Generation X to the new Millennial Generation which possesses a very different perspective. We were tasked with replacing the previous version of Marines.com with a site better than the previous, award winning site, that would put the other branches to shame (this was sort of an unspoken requirement), and would connect on a deep level with the targeted audiences. It had to be measurable, generate usable metrics for recruiters, and we were to do it in less time with less budget. Oh, and we had to develop a 508 compliant, search engine optimized, html version as well.

Result +
Requests for information (recruiter contact) went up 10 percent. Recruiters are telling us the quality of potential recruits delivered via the web site is up. Reports of technical problems with the site are down dramatically compared to the previous site. Usability testing confirmed that the impressive method of navigating using data points is eagerly embraced by our primary target audience and that they think the site is (expletive deleted) cool! The ROI is phenomenal with the site contributing to 30 percent of qualified leads but costing only 1 percent of the total marketing budget.

Link +
marines.com