The U.S. Army will run ads this Saturday during the NCAA Final Four Tournament using existing footage from older commercials and unused material from the new “Be All You Can Be” campaign instead of featuring actor Jonathan Majors.
A day after the Creed III actor was arrested last weekend for allegedly assaulting a woman in New York, the Army announced that it would be pulling two ads from its new campaign aimed at enlisting Gen Z. Majors’ rep has said he is “completely innocent.”
Although other ads from the Majors-led campaign will be postponed, the repurposed ads — featuring content from earlier campaigns “Passions” and “Know Your Army” — will help ensure the Army avoids losses in its planned $70 million advertising buy. “The U.S. Army has preserved 100 percent of the value of our media inventory so far, losing no money in the brand campaign’s media investment,” Laura DeFrancisco, the public affairs chief for the Army Enterprise Marketing Office, told The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday.
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“We are absolutely able to utilize a majority of what we have invested,” Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, head of Army Enterprise Marketing, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We think that we’ll have some brand new creative ads in time for the Women’s Final Four on Friday.”
The new commercials will feature “an enormous amount” of footage from the “Overcoming Obstacles” and “Pushing Tomorrow” commercials that had featured Majors as the narrator, with Fink noting that most of that content didn’t include the narrator. That has allowed the Army to go back and produce “basically new commercials, new ads,” he said.
“The campaign is full steam ahead,” he confirmed.
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to the campaign’s ad agency Team DDB for comment.
The ad campaign — which totaled $117 million — is slated to span TV and audio spots, digital and physical ads on billboards, buses and at airports, as well as online, with social media placements on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That includes a spot in every single men’s basketball tournament game and most women’s games, alongside ads in the March Madness Live app, on-site events at games across the country and activations. Among them is the Impossible Shot, which will be at both the Men’s and Women’s Final Four, running from March 31 to April 3.
Buys for the campaign, which included premium 60-second placements, will be aired during the NCAA basketball tournament as well as other NCAA championships, including wrestling, baseball and softball, through August.
The first slate of ads featuring Majors rolled out March 12, before being pulled Sunday following the actor’s arrest in New York on Saturday in relation to what an NYPD spokesperson described as a domestic dispute with a 30-year-old woman. The actor’s criminal lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, said in a statement Sunday that Majors “is completely innocent and is provably the victim of an altercation with a woman he knows.”
Majors was initially eyed as the face of the “Be All You Can Be” campaign after John Carstens, executive creative director of the campaign’s ad agency Team DDB, saw his performance in Lovecraft Country, with Fink telling THR that his outspokenness about his family’s history of service also informed the choice. (According to Carstens, there was no intention for Majors to be an ongoing face for the Army.)
In a statement Sunday, DeFrancisco said, “The U.S. Army is aware of the arrest of Jonathan Majors, and we are deeply concerned by the allegations surrounding his arrest.” She added, “While Mr. Majors is innocent until proven guilty, prudence dictates that we pull our ads until the investigation into these allegations is complete.”
The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania star was charged with misdemeanor assault and harassment Sunday during his arraignment, with the judge granting a limited order of protection and the actor being released on his own recognizance.
March 30, 9:30 a.m. Updated with additional background on the ad campaign and statement from public affairs chief Laura DeFrancisco.
