Army News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports - Army Times

Homegrown Navy videos sparking online records

SAN DIEGO — For all the official Navy recruiting ads posted on the Internet, a couple of homemade videos are reaching more online viewers than the service’s own pitches — a feat that shows the power of the Internet to sell and tell the Navy’s story.

Two music videos made by the “Sun Kings” of Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron 116 have tallied more than 800,000 hits on YouTube, the community video-sharing website, as of Feb. 19. One of the videos — the squadron’s take on the Black Eye Peas’ hit song, “Pump It” — has chalked up more than 515,000 hits since its August posting on YouTube, surpassing hits on the professional band’s own videos on the site.

And the video recently caught the attention of the Navy’s top networking officer, Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, whose own children’s favorite is the squadron’s music video version of Outkast’s’ hit song, “Hey Ya,” which has collected more than 370,000 hits on MyTube.

Both videos, which the Point Mugu, Calif.-based squadron shot during a cruise aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, show sailors and air crew flying, working and having fun on their deployment as they mouth the words in a mock sing-a-long with the song.

Edwards, speaking last month at the “West 2007” defense industry conference in San Diego, featured the “Pump It” video during a luncheon presentation about Navy networking. Displayed on large overhead screens, the video’s humorous images and song’s catchy finger-tapping beat demanded the attention of many on the conference floor.

And that, in itself, may have proved Edward’s point.

On an adjacent screen he showed a short recruiting video from the Navy’s ad pitch series, “Accelerate Your Life,” often aired in commercials and posted on official Navy web sites. Its viewers, he noted, fall far short compared to those homemade online videos. It’s not alone. On MyTube, for example, an official recruiting ad called “Navy Opportunities” got a five-star rating but posted only 576 viewings, as of Feb. 19.

And that means the Navy’s official pitch is missing much of the online target audience: The Millennium Generation, men and women ages 24 and under, who represents the Navy’s recruiting pool. But they more often bypass the traditional recruiting approach in favor of trendy collaborative sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

“Whose lives do we want to accelerate? Who are our warriors today?” Edwards, the deputy chief of naval operations for communication networks, asked rhetorically.

Unlike Generation X, those ages 25 to 45 whose naval careers saw the creation of e-mail and the worldwide web, the Millennials, as children, teens and young adults ages 6 to 24 are known, “are technically savvy. They grew up with the Internet.” And they expect more from it, he added.

The Navy must quickly adapt, Edwards suggested. “This is how people are getting the information,” he said of sites like YouTube that enable users to post, share and downloads thousands of videos and clips. “You can tell your story in MySpace. You can tell your story on Google. You can tell your story on YouTube. It is such a powerful concept.”

“The Navy’s got to kind of get into it,” he said, noting, “This trend isn’t going to stop.”

One community – naval special warfare – already has set anchor in YouTube to help it reach out and grow its commando force.

Posted on YouTube is an official video called “Defending Freedom,” narrated by actor Gerald McRaney, that tells today’s story of Navy SEALs and special warfare combatant crewmen, or SWCCs. The nearly eight-minute video was produced in 2005 for the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, Calif. It’s been viewed on YouTube more than 712,000 times since its mid-January posting.