Phil Elliott 15:32 (BST)
22/01/2008

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An in-game advertising campaign run by Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) last year in two Tom Clancy videogames prompted a 500 per cent increase in activity on the related recruitment web site, it has been revealed.

The campaign, which featured billboards advertising careers at GCHQ in Ubisoft titles Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Rainbow Six: Vegas, ran for a month and was managed by TMP Worldwide, according to a report in Recruiter.

Kate Clemens, head of GCHQ's digital strategy at TMP, stated that she felt the campaign had been successful as a general profile-raising exercise, with traffic increasing from around 500-600 people per day visiting the "Careers in British Intelligence" site to between 4000 and 7000.

GCHQ spokesperson Alan Thompson added that while it wasn't possible to tell at this point how the increased traffic would result in recruitment, he did believe that it had targeted the right people.

"There is no doubt that the gaming idea and subsequent media publicity has significantly increased awareness of GCHQ as a potential employer," he said.

"We will be working with TMP to find other fresh ideas to appeal to those entering the job market. In particular, we would like to encourage more women to enter careers in engineering and technology."

As well as generating awareness within the games themselves, the nature of the campaign, and more specifically the career being advertised, gave rise to a relatively high level of national specialist and mainstream press coverage, which may have also helped to increase traffic to the web site.

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