B-ARMY GOPRO ‘VID GAME’ COST €200K
Defence Forces’ massive spend on recruitment clip
THE Defence Forces spent nearly €200,000 on a 150-second “video game” that was filmed on a Gopro camera with the aim of enticing young people to join the military.
DVDS of a trailer for the game were to be left on after-school bus and train services with a view to targeting children, internal correspondence seen by the Irish Mirror state.
More than €50,000 was spent on a marketing campaign that deliberately concealed the fact that it was a recruitment tool for the Defence Forces.
“It’s important that nothing can be obviously traced back to you guys about this,” one of its developers wrote in an email to military personnel regarding the promotion of the game.
A number of high-profile influencers were also paid to promote the game on social media platforms, while ads were placed in the front window of computer shops “as a stunt”.
A New Dawn comprises two-and-ahalf minutes of footage showing a military training exercise.
The “player” is given six binary choices at various intervals, which either continue the video or end the “game”. A creative and advertising agency in Dublin was paid a total of €192,134 by the Defence Forces to produce it.
In the lead-up to its official launch, the marketing campaign aimed to create the false impression that
A New Dawn was a real video game, and mock-ups of a Playstation 4 game cover were produced.
When A New Dawn was officially launched in 2017, then-defence Minister
Paul Kehoe said the Defence Forces had become “the first military in the world” to use an interactive video game as part of a recruitment campaign. A spokesman for the Defence Forces told the Irish Mirror that the Irish military requires “men and women from all backgrounds that possess a strong sense of duty, enjoy working as part of a team, and are looking for a rewarding yet challenging career”.