CourtAvenue has won a nine-year assignment from the U.S. Air Force, an unusual account that covers communications aimed at speeding AI and other technology transfer across the far-flung global operations of the military branch.

The Cincinnati-based independent agency is the only marketing services agency named among 67 entities included in a nine-year $1 billion Rapid Sustainment Office contract awarded by the Air Force late last month.

The assignment is broad-ranging, covering digital media and marketing as well as digital consumer experience and other go-to-market strategy and implementation.

“We’ll help the Air Force commercialize new kinds of platforms,” said CourtAvenue CEO Michael Stich. “That might mean we create internal social networks that allow for different bases to collaborate with each other. It might mean that we have some ability to do go-to-market packaging for new initiatives, like advanced manufacturing solutions, 3D printing and then accelerate the diffusion of those platforms and programs across the Air Force.”

CourtAvenue previously had a digital agency-of-record assignment with the Air Force through the University of Dayton Research Institute. The new assignment covers broader work across a broader set of organizations that are being consolidated, Stich said.

In a sense, it’s an internal communications program, albeit one that covers a sprawling operation with nearly 500,000 uniformed personnel, 170,000 civilian employees and 59 bases in addition to other facilities. The assignment will draw on brand development and creative storytelling capabilities, Stich said, applied in a different way inside the Air Force.

The scope of the work in what’s technically called an Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) award is an open-ended assignment giving CourtAvenue authority to talk to and work with units within the Air Force on developing assignment, said Jana Roszkowski, chief operations officer of the agency.