Advertising is all about creativity, but it’s also about spending money to get a product in front of as many eyes as possible. That can be achieved with strategic billboard placements on busy highways, forking over millions for a 30-second Super Bowl ad snippet, paying social media influencers to talk up a brand — the list goes on and on. But what if a brand could slap its logo across a heavenly body visible to every person on the planet? Yes, we’re talking about the moon. It sounds crazy, and it certainly is, but that hasn’t stopped brands from trying, or at least claiming to try.
In 1999, marketing executive Steve Koonin was working at Coca-Cola when he pitched the idea of projecting the brand’s logo onto the moon after reading an article about how scientists measure the distance between the moon and Earth using lasers. “In success it would be stupendous,” Koonin told The New York Times in 2008. “Even in failure they’d be talking about you for a while.” He hired a team of scientists, dumped a few hundred thousand dollars into project development, but then ditched the idea in light of logistical issues.
Although Koonin’s plan never truly left the drawing board, it did inspire others to toy with the idea of beaming a logo onto the moon, and the most iconic ad campaign relating to such a feat was definitely Rolling Rock beer’s “Moonvertising” stunt. Back in 2006, Anheuser-Busch purchased the brand and moved all Rolling Rock production from its original Latrobe, Pa., brewery to A-B’s facility in Newark, N.J., resulting in substantial backlash from longtime Rolling Rock devotees. Two years later, beverage conglomerate InBev acquired Anheuser-Busch, forming AB-InBev, and the new entity decided to pull Rolling Rock out of the doghouse with a seemingly ambitious ad campaign dreamt up by the Goodby, Silverstein & Partners ad agency.
In early March 2008, the Moonvertising campaign kicked off with a series of billboard and television ads claiming that the Rolling Rock logo would be projected across the moon’s surface with a laser beam on March 21, as the day marked the next full moon. The ads also encouraged onlookers to go to moonvertising.com (which no longer exists), where people could type up messages and project them onto a virtual moon.
Given the bold, hard-to-believe nature of the proposed stunt, many were skeptical of its legitimacy from the get-go. Yet, curiosity and hope held out. The night arrived and — surprise, surprise — nothing happened. No sign of a celestial billboard, just a standard full moon. Moonvertising was a hoax.
They say any press is good press, but when a struggling brand is at stake, a questionable ad campaign can be the kiss of death. A year after the Moonvertising stunt, AB-InBev started looking to sell off Rolling Rock, citing declining sales.
For all the dreamers out there, it’s worth noting that the concept of Moonvertising is technically possible. Jim Garvin, former chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told The New York Times that “in order for an advertisement to be seen by people on earth, the laser light would need to cover an area about half the land size of Africa.” So it’s possible, but no one ever said it was practical.
*Image retrieved from muratart via stock.adobe.com
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