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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).