Being known as the world’s pre-eminent fighting force has its perceptual drawbacks, primarily the belief that the focus is on physical combat. This is particularly true for STEM students who see the U.S. Army as an outdated institution comprised primarily of brawn – a place that’s not for them. Our job was to reveal the reality…that the Army is made up of the nation’s most innovative thinkers who are equipped with today’s most advanced technologies. We set out to create a campaign that could attract highly qualified STEM candidates and motivate them to learn more about the Army’s STEM careers.

Beyond creating a custom website specifically designed to challenge STEM candidates, a custom trailer, similar to what you would find for high profile console games, was created and targeted to reach gamers and the STEM target across YouTube. Additionally, a comprehensive and robust media plan was strategically crafted to leverage Google’s suite of cross-platform solutions with AdMob, the Google Display Network, YouTube True View, and cross-screen YouTube mastheads. Additionally, partnerships with StumbleUpon, Flipboard, and Sharethrough also aided in syndicating out Cryptaris messaging to the relevant target audience. Furthermore, knowing that the M18-24 demo indexes highly against gaming and e-gaming, we placed media within platforms such as IGN and Twitch to appear against content gamers were already interacting with. Finally, we also capitalized on the trend that online interactions are based on a sense of community and sharing so we placed media across Reddit in order to encourage social chatter.

Mission accomplished. Cryptaris Mission attracted and motivated highly qualified STEM candidates to engage. In just three days the trailer garnered 1MM views, more than 6MM in one month.

After the first month, over 900,000 users visited the site, spending an average of 2 minutes and 55 seconds. 161,000 users returned to play more missions, and approximately 7,000 users returned to play 9+ times. 3,600 users logged their score onto the leaderboard, and more than 7,000 players went to goarmy.com to learn more about STEM jobs available in the Army, blowing our benchmarks out of the water.

To date, only 0.15% of users have been able to complete all seven levels – resulting in user-generated content to trade site secrets on how to beat these levels. With over 4,000 site link shares on Facebook, users began to create their own content on Reddit and YouTube, videotaping their