The Army is mobilizing to quickly update its planned Jonathan Majors recruiting ads touting the service so that they can run as scheduled.
The ads were pulled last Sunday following Majors’s weekend arrest on various assault charges. The new ads will be part of the men’s and women’s Final Four advertising offerings by the Army.
Majors was brought on board as a narrator of the revived “Be All You Can Be” Army ads. The service hoped to capitalize on his popularity, thanks to his work in the recent Creed III and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania films.
Majors faces charges of strangulation, assault, and harassment in what was described as a domestic dispute with a 30-year-old woman who has not been identified. His lawyer contends there is evidence exonerating him. But the Army didn’t want to insert itself into the controversy at a time when it desperately needs to perk up recruiting, which last year fell way short of its goals.
The Army is spending more than $117 million on its advertising buy for the “Be All You Can Be” campaign, which will be on social media, television and digital and physical billboards.
“A majority of that content did not contain our main narrator. … So we have a ton of content to go back to, to create basically new commercials new ads, if we need to,” said Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, head of Army marketing, to The Associated Press. “The campaign is full steam ahead.”