Case Study: Royal Australian Navy boosts recruitment engagement with VMLY&R’s hidden audio ad

Royal Australian Navy boosts job listing engagement 80x with VMLY&R

The Royal Australian Navy, through Defence Force Recruiting, faced the unique challenge of recruiting for the highly specialized role of Electronic Spectrum Systems Operator. To attract a very small, technically-minded audience of problem solvers, they partnered with the vendor VMLY&R to create a novel recruitment campaign.

VMLY&R developed "The Audio Ad You Can See," an innovative piece of audio that hid a recruitment image within its frequencies, only visible when processed through a spectrogram. This solution directly mirrored the work of the Navy's intelligence personnel. The campaign was a major success, becoming one of the Navy's most effective recruitment efforts. It achieved 512% more impressions and drove 80 times more engagement with the job listing from high-quality candidates.

Royal Australian Navy