The US Army will run ads using existing footage from older commercials and unused footage from the new Be All You Can Be campaign this Saturday during the NCAA Final Four tournament, 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 it would be pulling ads from its new Gen Z recruiting campaign. The majors’ rep said he was “completely innocent. ”
Though other ads from the major-led campaign will be moved, the repurposed ads will help the Army avoid losses on its planned $70 million ad buy.
“We’re absolutely able to leverage a lot of our investments,” Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, head of Army Enterprise Marketing, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We think we’ll have some brand new creative ads in time for Friday’s Women’s Final Four.”
The new commercials will include “a tremendous amount” of footage from the “Overcoming Obstacles” and “Pushing Tomorrow” commercials in which Majors acted as narrator, with Fink noting that most of that content did not feature the narrator. That has allowed the army to go back and produce “fundamentally new commercials, new ads,” he said.
“The campaign is in full swing,” he confirmed.
has reached out to representatives from the US Army and the campaign’s advertising agency Team DDB for comment.
The advertising campaign – which totaled $117 million – was expected to include TV spots, digital and physical ads on billboards and buses, and online with social media placements on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The first batch of ads featuring majors was released on March 12 before dropping on Sunday following the actor’s arrest in New York on Saturday in connection with what an NYPD spokesman described as a domestic dispute with a 30-year-old woman became. The actor’s attorney, Priya Chaudhry, said in a statement on Sunday that Majors “is completely innocent and has been proven the victim of an altercation with a woman he knows.”
Majors was initially thought to be the face of the Be All You Can Be campaign after John Carstens, executive creative director of the campaign’s Team DDB advertising agency, saw his performance in Lovecraft Country, with Fink telling THR his candidness about the story of the His family’s service also informed about the election. (According to Carstens, Majors was not intended to be a permanent face for the Army.)
In a statement Sunday, Laura DeFrancisco, the Army Enterprise Marketing Office’s director of public affairs, said, “The U.S. Army is aware of the arrest of Jonathan Majors, and we are deeply concerned by the allegations surrounding his arrest.” adding, “While Mr. Majors is innocent until proven guilty, prudence dictates that we withdraw our charges pending the investigation of these allegations.”
The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania star was charged with assault and molestation during his arraignment on Sunday, with the judge granting a limited protection order and releasing the actor on his own.