Ads on G* rockets?
Published Friday, October 1, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News
Outer space: the next
advertising frontier
Pizza Hut puts its logo on Russian rocket
DALLAS (AP) -- Pizza Hut wanted a billboard on the moon. It
settled for a Russian rocket bound for space.
The company announced Thursday that it would pay the cash-starved
Russian space agency about half the price of a 30-second TV ad
during the Super Bowl -- currently up to $2.5 million -- for the right
to paint its logo on a Russian Proton rocket.
The rocket is scheduled to blast off in mid-November with the living
quarters for the International Space Station.
The segment carrying the Pizza Hut logo will be cast off and burn up
in the atmosphere before it reaches orbit. But Pizza Hut marketers are
counting on the minutes leading up to liftoff and the sight of the engines
firing under the company's red-roof logo to give them enough film
footage to fuel years of future advertising campaigns.
Although the stunt shows how space could be the next commercial
frontier, don't expect American spacecraft to look like NASCAR
cars any time soon.
While U.S. law doesn't preclude placing corporate logos on
American spacecraft, NASA would not consider it on taxpayer
property, agency spokesman Brian Welch said Thursday.
Still, Daniel Tam, NASA's assistant to the administrator for
commercialization, said space agencies need to think about the
marketing potential they can offer in an era of shrinking budgets for
space exploration.
``We want to find a way to get the commercial sector involved as fast
as possible and effectively as possible so that we can . . . move on to
explore beyond the solar system,' Tam said.
The Russians, meanwhile, have used corporate advertising to their
advantage. PepsiCo Inc. paid $5 million three years ago to have
cosmonauts float a replica of a soda can outside the Mir space
station.
Pizza Hut marketers first considered burning a billboard into the moon
with lasers, Chief Executive Officer Mike Rawlings said. But
astronomers and physicists advised that the image would have to be
the size of Texas to be seen by Earthlings more than 238,000 miles
away.
And considering that a moon-etching would have cost hundreds of
millions of dollars, a rocket ad for a couple of million seems a bargain.
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