The Irish Defence Forces has launched a new campaign aimed at recruiting women to join the Irish Army. The campaign was created by Rothco and is running on social media, online and cinema.
Currently, less than 1 in 10 serving members of the Irish Defence Forces is female. Following the White Paper on Defence which was published last year, the aim is to double the percentage of serving female members to 12%.
According to Emer Howard, strategy director with Rothco, the agency needed to find the problem that it needed to solve.
“Through our initial research, we discovered that for the majority of females a career in the Defence Forces is simply not on their radar. And those who are aware rule themselves out because they don’t think they’d be the right fit. We had to find qualified leads – candidates who match the characteristics that the Defence Forces look for in recruits: physical and moral courage, integrity, selflessness, respect, and loyalty. Through precision targeting, we found that the perfect candidates are team players – young women who are at their very best when they’re on the playing field. And the exciting thing was that these young women were simply oblivious to the fact that they could get paid for doing what they love. So we set about changing this with a video piece that is designed to convey fit in the hope that our target audience will engage with the prospect of an exciting career that they had previously not considered,” she says.
“Through the story of a young woman on her journey from GAA team training to army training, we highlight the similarities between both, and the fact that they’ve been training all of their life for a job they didn’t know exists. We narrowed down on our target on Facebook – our key channel, bolstered by GAA clubs sharing on their social pages, cinema for general awareness and homepage takeovers on key sites for our target such as Her.ie.
