Can you find these missing submarines? The Navy wants to know, and if you can, to recruit you. That’s the gist of the U.S. Navy’s latest recruitment effort, which isn’t through a conventional advertising campaign but through a series of puzzles and challenges on Reddit.
This month the Navy launched “Sub Reddit Hunt,” a new online scavenger hunt meant to “designed to attract the next generation of submariners.” The game requires players to decipher a series of codes and audio files to locate missing submarines, with the game taking place entirely on the website, according to a report in AdAge.
The campaign’s name, a play on the “subreddits” dedicated to specific topics on the website, is accessible through the AmericasNavy account, with players tasked with deciphering several codes to locate five different submarines over a five-week period. The Sub Reddit Hunt post is the first one in the subreddit in months.
The project was created by the Navy alongside the advertising agency VML, which has worked with major corporations such as Ford and Coca-Cola. Now it’s trying a kind of month-long alternate reality game, a type of interactive marketing strategy that’s become popular in the last 20 years; the video game ‘Halo 2’ and the movie ‘The Dark Knight’ were some projects that had ARGs built around them.
The campaign “encourages Reddit users to decipher codes and search for clues to complete command directives,” VML said in a release.
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Looking at the account , the challenges are located on a main thread, which will be updated as new ones are released. Each challenge links to a new post, featuring The first, “Sunshine,” asks players to assume the role of a specialized enlisted sailor and review data that will help locate a submarine.
“Information for specialized enlisted Sailors. Analyze classified headings. Identify beginner coordinates. Bubblehead start,” it reads. “DM upon success. Welcome aboard, Sunshine.”
The directive, taking the form of redacted logs (players can simply click on the black bars to reveal text), follows the USS Nautilus, on its way to Europe from Pearl Harbor via the North Pole. The log, spanning August, features longitude and latitude coordinates, headings and near the end, a cryptic code meant to be deciphered by players.
The main thread will be updated with each new mission. New missions drop every Monday, with the next one releasing on Oct. 7.
The game is the Navy’s latest marketing campaign to bring in new blood. The Navy actually reached its overall recruiting goal for the last fiscal year, with 40,978 new people enlisting. The Navy, like other military branches, has tried to woo Americans into joining through money. That included specific enlistment bonuses for specialized roles in the service. Lately some of the branches’ have opted for slick, unusual videos. That included the U.S. Army, which put up the ominous “Ghosts in the Machine” ad for the Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne). The Navy already advertises with traditional ads on Reddit, but this new campaign is a different type of way to entice potential recruits. VML is currently in the middle of a five-year contract with the Navy for marketing purposes.
The military as a whole hasn’t shied away from trying to bring in new recruits via the Internet or social media — or even going to video game and comic book conventions — but the month-long Reddit-based game is a new approach. Instead of the usual marketing terms, this one is aimed towards people who like puzzles and can solve them; theoretically it helps the Navy find people already geared towards the kind of jobs it hopes to fill. As for the exact prizes for completing the game or how this campaign ends with players potentially enlisting, that hasn’t been revealed.
How about it? Are you taking part in the Navy’s new game?
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