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.

While Ellen DeGeneres was busy breaking Twitter with the singlemost retweeted picture in history, as a fortunate bi-product of Samsung product placement, most major brands were only partially engaging with an audience that found itself at a fever-pitch. Real time marketing is a hot topic for 2014 and while it remains inexorably linked to a biscuit, thanks to Oreo’s memorable Superbowl offering, that’s proof that it’s not quite blossomed out to its full potential.

Arby’s, the American food outlet, stole an early lead in the field for 2014 with its Grammys stealing comments on musician-of-the-moment Pharrell Williams’ unusual hat and its uncanny likeness to their logo. The brand moved on to cement their relationship by then purchasing the hat when it was sold for charity by Pharrell and even managed to insert themselves into the Oscars buzz thanks to Williams’ nomination for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack.

With the spectacular space setting for Gravity generating a lot of the excitement around the visuals in cinema in the build up to the Oscars, NASA was presented with a comfortable opportunity to let its content do the talking. Sharing remarkable vistas of the cosmos, NASA was able to present one of the most coherent and inspiring brand experiences of the night.

NASA’s ability to share from their library of images and still create interest was an attribute sadly lacked by some of the stock-image posts from brands that fell flat. At least though they were on topic; as some brands had pre-bought social space, or in this case “#jennifer lawrence”, with no intention of mentioning the American Hustle star. Which is strange in itself, as their audience was mentioning just that.

At this stage in its development the practice of Real Time Marketing will see its fair share of missteps and also landmarks, so the need for inspiring leaders becomes crucial. At the moment most real time marketing efforts garner less than 100 shares and most marketers surveyed would describe themselves as ill-equipped or unsupported.

However with the likes of Urban Airship this period of uncertainty and nervousness may be set to end, as the Wall Street Journal explains:

Real Time Marketing certainly makes itself an outstanding argument as one of the richest frontiers for exploration for brands looking to engage with the first generation raised on Tumblr’s cross-media scavenging and unstoppable torrent of memes.  With major players already staking their interest and year that’s ripe with events, including an especially exciting Brazil-based World Cup, by this time next year there could be more in the hall of fame than a solitary Oreo.