Within the world of promotional military videos, strategies don’t differ much from selling women’s cosmetics. Promoting youthful fun through products that are designed to solve disappointments, packaging speaks to the age of being savvy. The viewer engages with the sales video, and is left longing for the promise of a future valorized by sex they’ll deserve. Reinforcing products with flashy imagery, war-machine marketers will get you to grow up to be the man you always wanted to be, but who still gets to play video games.
Centered on reaching military purchaser affect via high-budget cinema aesthetics, the industry is giving the college-aged military market some attractive compatibility, like X-Box controllers that fire actual weapons and move real robots. These images are accompanied with slick soundtracks or There-Will-Be-Blood-style-color-correction and uncompromising durability. By the end of each video, arms purchasers must be chomping at the bit to get their sweaty hands on these real-life adaptations of Counterstrike, Call of Duty, Duck Hunt and Homefront – you know, the game from where you can fly a drone.
Videos by VICE
Read the rest at Motherboard.
