If Advertisers Were Supervillains, or Vice Versa

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

If you were a mad scientist evil genius who happened to only be interested in advertising, it would make sense for you to come up with this: a way to brand the moon with a giant ad. You'd call the UN, get on that big screen, and blackmail the world into caving into your demands, otherwise you were going to deface the moon with a colossal ad for Gold Bond Foot Powder or Cool Ranch Doritos.

This idea has been around a while, and I have no doubt it's possible. The only way I think this could be justified is if the advertiser paid each and every moon-gazing person some amount to do this, since the visual image of the moon in the night sky can be thought of as public property; you can't legally throw a billboard up on land that you don't own, so I don't see how this is different. But, if someone wants to rent the moon from the collected people of Earth, who knows? Feel free to make us an offer; someone's almost always here.

Carrie McLaren & Jason Torchinsky are coeditors of _Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture_. In previous lives, they worked together on the hopelessly obscure and now defunct Stay Free! magazine. He lives in LA and writes for the Onio

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Anonymous

Reference ‘The Man Who Sold the Moon’, by Robert Heinlein, in 1940, for this idea.
Anonymous

Arthur Clarke had a short story about this, the name of which escapes me. I seem to recall a Coke logo.

Better make it erasable. Stuff on the moon tends to stay where you put it for a long time.
tim

Whaddya mean “if”?

Do you not read your own blog? http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/21/flashback-to-1933-us-1.html
Anonymous

In my day, we only had advertisements on TV and radio. And in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and written in the sky. But not on the moon! No siree!
Anonymous

I just got the latest Perry Bible Fellowship comic collection book for my birthday, and this story reminded me of this particular strip:

http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF105-The_Schlorbians_Strike_Again.jpg
Theophylact

Heinlein used a (false) threat to turn the moon into a soft-drink billboard as a plot gimmick in “The Man Who Sold The Moon”(1949). As I recall, it involved small moon-based projectors firing carbon black in a pattern to create the logo.
TheCrawNotTheCraw

If Neil Armstring had said “Coca Cola” instead of “One small step for (a) man…”, it would have been the advertising coup of the millenium.

It wouldn’t have been “necessary” to place an ad on the surface of the moon. The notoriety and publicity which would have ensued would have been worth a fortune, because it would have gone into the history books, and we would never be able to forget it (shudder).
Anonymous

It strikes me that what we should actually do is fill the face of the moon with useful information – but not advertising graffiti – as a way of future proofing against the possibility of civilization’s downfall.

If our civilization should fall back to the stone age, this writing would forever be visible to any future civilization that might arise; a gift from the past, and a lasting warning to those that might read it.
Takuan

thank the gods Moka Coka won.
fnc

#1 : HA
kawayama

in a Spirou album from 1961, zorglub paints the coca-cola logo on the moon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_comme_Zorglub
Anonymous

The Arthur C. Clarke story was “Watch This Space”
carriem

@#1:
i love you.

As if Chairface Chippendale made the first comment :)
Anonymous

Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon” featured an entrepreneur raising funds for a moonshot. He would walk into somebody’s office wearing a button with the rival’s logo, and tell him “this looked the same size to you as the Moon looks from Earth.” Heinslein never used a specific name, as I recall, but one was obviously “Coca Cola”. Another was a red star, used to bait an anti-Communist.
Boba Fett Diop

If advertisers really were supervillains, my clients would be the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight.
celia

There’s an Eliot Fintushel story–Kukla Boogie Moon ( http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?101880 )– which has a cola logo on the moon–I can’t remember if it was projected on to it or lasered on, though. And it really wasn’t the scariest part of the advertising campaign in the story, so you know, it could be worse.
Anonymous

Chairface Chippendale tried to put his name on the moon, but “The Tick” put a stop to that. Just as the “A” was being etched.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chairface_Chippendale
CosmicDog

“You can’t legally throw up a billboard on land that you don’t own…” Sure you can, if you have permission from the owner. However, the argument that the moon can be seen in Earth’s sky makes it public property of the people of Earth, is fallacious. Just seeing something does not imply ownership. There are lots of things that we can see in the sky, but they do not belong to us. So, since there is no owner, advertisers should feel free to post whatever messages they want on the moon. No one has a legal claim to stop them. I can’t imagine anything that would be valuable enough to justify the expense, but hey, it’s their money.
Fiddy

Rudy Rucker also extrapolates on this idea in his novel PostSingular, in which a corporation sends a probe filled with nanomachines (“nants”) to Mars, where they are programmed to re-engineer the entire planet into a gigantic electronic billboard that fills the entire sky of the earth with advertising and political propaganda.
therevengor

CHA
dculberson

Good thing we can use our missile defense system to shoot down their rocket after launch!
AlexG55

There’s an old joke about this:
At 3 AM, an advisor wakes the President. “Mr. President, the Russians are painting the Moon red!” The President says “I’ll deal with it later” and goes back to sleep.
At 4 AM, the same advisor comes in. “Mr. President, the Russians have now painted half the Moon red! What should we do?”
“Go away, I’ll deal with it in the morning!”
At 5 AM, he comes in again. “Mr. President, the Russians have painted three-quarters of the Moon red! We should really do something!”
“GO AWAY! I’M ON IT!”
At 6, the President wakes up to find the advisor standing by his bed. “Mr. President, while you were asleep, the Russians painted the whole Moon red! This is a national embarrassment! What do you propose to do about it?”
“Relax. Just send our guys up to paint Coca-Cola on it.”
Brainspore

The novel adaptation of “Red Dwarf” featured a spaceship crew on an interstellar mission to make a specific pattern of stars go supernova simultaneously. The idea was that from earth they would appear to spell out “COKE ADDS LIFE.”
Takuan

6+?