Can on the moon.
(credit: the verge)
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.
Russian astronauts inflate their space Pepsi
(credit: capcomespace)
The first ad ever filmed in space. Milk doesn't look too appetising in zero gravity, I'm afraid.
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.
