Space: The final frontier for advertising.

Japanese company Otsuka is sending a drink called ‘sweat’ (Pocari Sweat in full) to the ‘Lake of Death’ on the moon for the value of the public and media attention it will bring.

The plan is to send a payload over 236,000 miles to put a can of powdered sports drink to the moon. There’s an added bonus for the makers of the lander, Astrobiotic Technologies, in the shape of  Google’s Lunar X price for successful moon exploration.

In part it’s the scale, expense and popular opposition to the commercialisation of space that’s meant that there hasn’t been much advertising in space prior to this.

The Russian space programme was less perturbed by the idea though, blowing up an inflatable Pepsi can on Mir in 1996, before Israeli milk company Tnuva filmed a whole ad there in 1997. 

By 2001 the Russians were back at it but with the global stage of the International Space Station; accepting deliveries from Pizza Hut, shortly after slapping their logo on rockets.

Amazingly before all this in 1993 a proposal was made for a 1km squared billboard, on a low orbit above the Earth, that’d be about the same size and visibility as the moon. It was promptly abandoned when it was realised everyone was more than happy with having one actual moon, the fact that night should essentially be dark and that space is pretty packed with things that’d smash into a billboard of that size. Faced with a such a spectacularly bad idea the US government banned space advertising later that year but that was scaled back in 2005 to exclude advertising that wasn’t “obtrusive” such as on the astronaut’s suit. Right now the US is the only country that officially prohibits space advertising.

It may seem a bit of an unnecessary leap for advertising to thrust itself into space, but it might be more likely than it seems at first glance. The modern consumers' life (and let’s be realistic, we’re a long way from stopping consuming) is dominated by marketing, branding and advertising.  Even the wonderful, open and seemingly limitless web you’re reading this on is largely supported by ad revenue. If a company stands to represent the experience of the web it could easily be Google, a company that generates more than 90% of its revenue from advertising.

There comes a time when we compromise and innovate, we push messaging into places it hasn’t been before, like the first time a sponsorappeared on a football kit or an ad came through on the radio. Ads are going up into space, bit by bit and in greater numbers – whether it’s a positive democratisation of space technology, or a negative commercialisation of a wondrous frontier we're yet to even graze is a question for the same audience as always, the viewers back on the ground.

For now it’s one not so small step for a drinks can, but one giant leap (good or bad) for advertising.