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The Skies Above, For Sale
by Alexandra Ringe | Stay Free! #19
For more than a century
advertisers have
been trying to change what we see when we gaze up yonder.
A CLOUDY NIGHT
In New York City in the early 1890s, nighttime clouds served as
projection screens for giant ads. A 3,000-pound lamp atop Joseph
Pulitzer's World building beamed text and figures from the news or
from sponsors onto the clouds; the messages were visible as far away
as New Jersey and Long Island. Major J.C. Savage used a similar method
of cloud projection in Britain in the
1930s, causing a debate in the pages of the Times of
London over whether the ads ought to be banned for besmirching the night
sky. The government committee investigating the matter decided in favor
of Major Savage: "[Cloud projection] forms a relief to the squalor
of the poorest streets and to the dull monotony of
many others. It is open to question whether the leaden gloom of heavy
clouds will be seriously desecrated by the loom of an unseen light." The
committee did see fit, however, to prohibit cloud projection on Sundays.
THE CLEAR BLUE
In 1922 the British newspaper Daily Mail sponsored the first use of
skywriting, then also known as smoke writing. The paper reported on
its own advertising stunt, boasting that the crowd only needed to
see the letters D-A-I-L to guess correctly (and loudly) "Daily
Mail!" By 1930 aerial advertising included banner towing and
blimps. These methods in the 1920s and 1930s—writing, towing,
and blimping—are still with us.
The only one to die out is sky shouting, which involved slow planes
equipped with huge loudspeakers blaring sales pitches. Said one witness, "Suddenly
you will hear a voice from heaven shouting ‘Smoke Old Gold,' and
then you will hear a bit of music. It is very discouraging to any mental
application."
SUNRISE, SUNSET
In 1993, Space Marketing Inc., the U.S. company that would later make
the Pepsi-cosmonaut connection, announced plans to send a mile-long
billboard into orbit around the Earth. Launched from a satellite and
then inflated to full size, the Mylar sign would be most visible at
sunrise and sunset and was meant to be ready in time for with the
1996 Summer Olympics. Eleven advertisers expressed interest but
backed off under pressure from U.S. PIRG and from Congress. Rep. Ed
Markey (D-Mass.) said the billboards would
turn our morning and evening skies into the "moral equivalent of
the
side of a bus." But other countries can still send the side of
a bus into
orbit, as they are beyond the purview of Congress' ban on "obtrusive" space
ads. In 2001 Marinello and Callaway Advertising
in Texas proposed a much bigger Mylar billboard: at 12 miles in
diameter, it would look as large as the full moon. "Whether people
like it or not," said the agency's Christian Marinello, "it
really is a
good idea."
LABELLALUNA
"People are becoming less precious about the moon," said Gary
Betts of The Mighty Big Idea, a London ad agency that in 1997 proposed
pro- jecting corporate logos onto the lunar surface. Betts continued,
"Why not have the Coca-Cola bottle, the Nike tick, or Mickey Mouse's
ears?" The agency's plan entailed sending two huge mirrors
into space to reflect the sun's light onto the moon. Mary Lou Jepsen,
formerly of NASA, was working on the same concept in the U.S. in
1999, although the mirrors in her plan are on Earth at a solar energy
facility in the Mojave Desert. Jepsen said she convinced potential clients
like Pepsi, MTV, and Nike that the public would boycott a product advertised
on the moon and that instead they should consider sponsoring a message
about a larger issue, such as human rights or global unity. She also
worried about cultures that attach "religious significance to
the moon" and the effect an ad (or any message) would have on them: "It's
important to work with the artists from those cultures to create the
imagery that will . . . minimize any mass suicide."
Select Sources:
E.S. Turner, The Shocking History
of Advertising(1953).
Carolyn Marvin, When Old
Technologies Were New: Thinking
about Communication in the Late
19th Century(1988).
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