Raising officers of the future

beans agency

art direction, video production

The Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi National Army Academy is a higher military education institution where cadets study for four years before being commissioned as officers in the Defense Forces.

In the spring of 2025, we launched a strategically important campaign for the Academy — to help shape and inspire more exceptional commanders for Ukraine’s future.

Kyiv Mohyla Academy? Kyiv University, Lviv University, UCU? Familiar and appealing names for senior high school students in Ukraine. Unfortunately, promoting military education in the fourth year of the full-scale war is a significant challenge when it comes to recruiting the officers of the future.

Brief

Our context: a challenging demographic situation, the absence of clear positioning, and a lack of understandable online information about what it means to be an officer — and how and why someone would become one.

On the other hand, the Defence Forces need the officers of the future — commanders who can think boldly and leaders ready to take responsibility.

At the same time, capturing the attention of the target audience, ages 16–25, is no easy task, especially when competing with communication campaigns from groups like the 3rd Assault Brigade, AZOV, or the Da Vinci Wolves. Standing out and avoiding repetition were also serious challenges.

Unfortunately, by the beginning of 2025, the prevailing perception of the Academy was all about discipline, drills, and strict military rules.

Our task, therefore, was to showcase the changes within the Academy — its advantages and the importance of military education. And we succeeded.

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The Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi National Army Academy is evolving to shape the officers of the future.

In the video, we demonstrated a shift away from the “don’t think — just follow orders” principle in military education. After all, if we want to shape the officers of the future, we need to embrace the opposite principle: think, act boldly. We highlighted the Academy’s core principles: human-centredness — placing the cadet at the heart of the system, aligning military education with the battlefield, and embracing openness and innovation.

We wanted our target audience to develop the right associations with the word officer — to see an officer as a leader, a commander, a strategist, a clever fox on the battlefield, and an architect of victories. After all, being an officer is about making critical decisions and shouldering significant responsibility.

We developed a marketing funnel to guide everyone from social media to a user-friendly landing page: https://www.vstup-nasv.info/
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As a result, we generated 390+ leads through the website — people who submitted applications to enroll.

We partnered with Planeta Kino, OKOO, placed ads on billboards, and even featured in the Telemarathon (so high school parents could see it too).
The total reach of the campaign content on social media exceeded 6,500,000.

We’re proud that roughly 20% of applicants who became cadets indicated in the survey that they learned about the Academy through social media advertising — that’s around 100 officers and commanders in four years.Marketing Strategy:

We developed a marketing funnel to guide everyone from social media to a user-friendly landing page: https://www.vstup-nasv.info/.
As a result, we generated 390+ leads through the website — people who submitted applications to enroll.

We partnered with Planeta Kino, OKКO, placed ads on billboards, and even featured in the TV (so high school parents could see it too).
The total reach of the campaign content on social media exceeded 6,500,000.

We’re proud that roughly 20% of applicants who became cadets indicated in the survey that they learned about the Academy through social media advertising — that’s around 100 officers and commanders in four years.

Team:

Director: Illia Halychanivskyi
Producers: Oleksii Fedak, Oleksandr Bulich, Vitalii Kyryliv
DOP: Taras Kirichuk
Editing: Mariian Shvai
Photography: Yura Malenko
Technical Support: link
Gaffer: Victor Sembratovych
Camera Technician: Dmytro Myslinchuk
Lighting: Sasha Shabalkin, Yaroslav Demchuk
Color Grading: Vlad Chernolyasov
Sound Design: ocean__t

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