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Recruiting Posters, Slogans and Commercials [Merged]

Oldgateboatdriver said:
First of all let me say that I think the ads are well done. Many of you may not have known the 1970's to 1980's era ads where you wondered if the military was actually a fighting force or a group of office workers. They were not martial nor inspirational.

But can't you still sing the song (there's no life like it and I won't regret the day...)?

The vision of the guy in full combat gear running across the pontoon bridge at Cornwallis is still vivid in my mind, 35 years later. 
 
Pusser said:
But can't you still sing the song (there's no life like it and I won't regret the day...)?

The vision of the guy in full combat gear running across the pontoon bridge at Cornwallis is still vivid in my mind, 35 years later.

We could have saved money and just "recycled" this commercial.  I think most of the equipment is still in use!   

There's no life like it!  -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDSaEWdMbI4
 
Pusser said:
But can't you still sing the song (there's no life like it and I won't regret the day...)?

The vision of the guy in full combat gear running across the pontoon bridge at Cornwallis is still vivid in my mind, 35 years later.

Or the guys coming off the ship with their hockey gear.  I bet those guys grandsons are serving on the same ship.
 
One thing that I always found funny about the "Fight" series of ads was the payoff never matched the buildup. Perhaps the most bizarre example was the one where a boarding party urgently draws weapons from the arms locker, scrambles aboard the RIB, then races off to......deliver bottles of water.

Somehow the makers of the ads (or the people who commissioned them) could not follow through the conclusion of "fight" and the actual nature and role of the Canadian Forces. Even the most current ads still seem a bit squeamish about what we really are supposed to be doing....
 
Thucydides said:
Somehow the makers of the ads (or the people who commissioned them) could not follow through the conclusion of "fight" and the actual nature and role of the Canadian Forces. Even the most current ads still seem a bit squeamish about what we really are supposed to be doing....
Some of our senior leadership is squeamish about what we are supposed to do.

Much better to feel warm and fuzzy than face reality.
 
Kat Stevens said:
Or the guys coming off the ship with their hockey gear.  I bet those guys grandsons are serving on the same ship.

That's why we have a rule in the RCN: When you hit 95% of the crew being younger than the ship, it's time to decommission her.

Don't laugh: On my last stint as CO of PORTE ST-JEAN, which was two weeks before her de-commissioning, the CERA was the only one onboard that was born when she had commissioned. :D
 
SeaKingTacco said:
I only wish there was such a rule. It might have saved us from the PRO fiasco...
More likely, we would just start posting people to ships by age.
 
Someone, somewhere, here on Army.ca, was looking for this:

CU7gOxdWIAAZ5UE.jpg:large


The text was:

CU7h8JoXAAg3aXY.jpg:large


(Thanks to RAdm John Newton for the "find.")
 
Oh god, ERC, I have been trying so hard to forget those days.

And BTW, the picture had to be taken either in the US or in Europe, because they didn't have photoshop in those days, and the large plane (background under the nose of the CC177) is of a type we did not have then in Canada.
 
Oldgateboatdriver said:
Oh god, ERC, I have been trying so hard to forget those days.

And BTW, the picture had to be taken either in the US or in Europe, because they didn't have photoshop in those days, and the large plane (background under the nose of the CC177) is of a type we did not have then in Canada.

Is that not a CC-130 back there?

As an aside, with those dreadful uniforms, it looks like they are off to the suicide chambers to end it all.

 
Technoviking said:
Is that not a CC-130 back there?

As an aside, with those dreadful uniforms, it looks like they are off to the suicide chambers to end it all.

I don't think it is a CC130.

This ad drove the old guard, and a bunch of us in the young guard, nuts. It typified everything that was going off the rails in the early seventies with a push for conformity (we came really close to a common cap badge) and management uber alles taking over. It might be going too far to claim that the appointment of Jacques Dextraze as CDS halted the slide and began to alter the course, but not by much.
 
Old Sweat said:
I don't think it is a CC130.

This ad drove the old guard, and a bunch of us in the young guard, nuts. It typified everything that was going off the rails in the early seventies with a push for conformity (we came really close to a common cap badge) and management uber alles taking over. It might be going too far to claim that the appointment of Jacques Dextraze as CDS halted the slide and began to alter the course, but not by much.

....is it just my computer, or do some others not see what ERC is referring to in the post yesterday?
 
Dimsum said:
....is it just my computer, or do some others not see what ERC is referring to in the post yesterday?

You may be too young and innocent to imagine the effect a recruiting ad claiming that a young captain in what was supposed to be a fighting organization actually was a civilian executive had on a large proportion of the officer corps. Even the tone of the blurb which was oriented towards self-advancement and not service to Canada was highly offensive to many.

I know of combat arms commanding officers who forbade their officers from carrying briefcases as a reaction to the ad.
 
Old Sweat said:
You may be too young and innocent to imagine the effect a recruiting ad claiming that a young captain in what was supposed to be a fighting organization actually was a civilian executive had on a large proportion of the officer corps. Even the tone of the blurb which was oriented towards self-advancement and not service to Canada was highly offensive to many.

I know of combat arms commanding officers who forbade their officers from carrying briefcases as a reaction to the ad.

Oh no, I mean I physically can't see it - ERC's post just has blanks where (presumably) there was video.
 
Dimsum said:
Oh no, I mean I physically can't see it - ERC's post just has blanks where (presumably) there was video.


I can see it ... if you want I'll send them to you via other means.
 
A bit of background, as it was told to me by the officer in the picture: The young officer was a CELE (Air) captain working at Trenton ~ he had an undistinguished military career but a rather more successful one as an engineer with TeleSat ... he just happened to be near the flight line on the day the ad agency was shooting the piece and he was dragooned into it. I'm no sure if they did any photoshopping or if, just as likely, a foreign aircraft was in Trenton for some reason.

Further to Old Sweat's comments: the ad actually did some good, in its own way. It crystalized some senior officers' thinking about what had gone so dreadfully wrong with what should be, actually, a fairly simple business. Some of our leaders began to fight back ... it was, and it remains a loooooong uphill struggle and there has been much backsliding on the way, but I think we you the CF saw the one error of its ways. Of course, for every admiral and general who saw that management was destroying both leadership and the military ethos there was another general or admiral who thought exactly the opposite. We were seeing, in our own senior ranks, what Evelyn Waugh described in the Sword of Honour series of novels ( in Officers and Gentleman, I think, but it may have been Men at Arms or Unconditional Surrender) as military men being, in reality, just "heavily armed civilians."

Several colossally bad decisions ~ including e.g. the formation of Air Command ~ date from that period.

 
Mention of the ad always brings to mind "Where, oh where have all the Tigers gone?" . . .

Here, at last, I had met the model for that marvelous recruiting advertisement which depicted an immaculate young officer descending, attaché case in hand, from a jet transport, to the accompaniment of a stirring call to arms to the effect that commissioning in the Canadian Armed Forces automatically transforms any young man into an EXECUTIVE.

Like many military scribblings worthy of occasional resurrection it can be found on Michael O'Leary's site.
http://regimentalrogue.com/papers/oldtiger.htm
 
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