Marketing in space needs to be shot into space

This week, condiments brand Sir Kensington’s (part of Unilever’s portfolio) announced its desire to travel to the great beyond by launching a petition for NASA to consider stocking its wares on all its missions. The brand created a “Proposal Pack,” with a variety of its products, hoping to impress the space agency, given that human taste is significantly dulled out of our orbit. 

Chris Symmes, Unilever North America’s senior marketing director of dressings and condiments, said in a statement, “If our goal is to help all people everywhere ‘Obey Tongue’ and experience other-worldly flavor, then we can’t stop at Earth’s atmosphere . . . we are excited to see where this proposal lands, with no flavor-craver being left behind.”

For all mayo-kind, indeed. The cosmos-aspiring condiments weren’t the only brand with a space plan this week. In a now-deleted Instagram post, a giant Oreo was pictured hovering above a city skyline, Close Encounters-style, with the caption, “A new Oreo cookie is about to land.” We do know that the Mondelez-owned cookie brand is planning a return to the Super Bowl to mark a decade since its “dunk in the dark” tweet, which has seemingly become canonized lore among social media marketers. Given the invasion vibes of that binned IG post, one can be forgiven for scanning the night sky and wondering, Are there other creme-filled sandwich cookies out there?

And that’s just within one week! Space. The final frontier . . . for marketers. With apologies to Captain Kirk, when all else fails, the great starry beyond is the refuge of advertisers seeking to not-so-boldly go where so, so many other brands have gone before. 

Back in 2021, Miller Genuine Draft threatened to launch a new seltzer along with every other beer brand at the time, but then zagged and instead pretended to launch actual seltzer into outer space. Because if you want to get people’s eyes in this Attention economy, one surefire way to at least raise an eyebrow is to mention space. 

It’s been more than two years since I last ranted against space-vertising, and yet we’re still stuck in this creative black hole. If we take a moonwalk down memory lane, you’ll recall that in 2018, Elon Musk—you know, the guy who hates advertising and thinks labeling himself Tesla’s Technoking is cool and funny—launched a Tesla Roadster into orbit, driven by a mannequin named Starman. A year earlier, KFC sent a Chicken Zinger sandwich to the stratosphere. In 1999, Pizza Hut paid about $1 million to have its logo slapped onto the side of a Russian Proton rocket launched to the International Space Station. Coke had a custom-made soda dispenser on the shuttle, Endeavor, in 1996, while Pepsi reportedly paid the Russian space agency $5 million to have a cosmonaut hold a replica can during a space walk. Back in 1984 (40 years ago!), NASA put cans of both Coke and Pepsi on the space shuttle as an experiment.

Add to all this the sheer number of ads that don’t actually threaten to go to space but use its imagery as part of selling guaranteed non-space-related products, and the question remains: Are we, as a culture, actually that obsessed with space? What does it mean for a soda or a pizza, a cookie or jar of mayo to invoke its mystery and wonder? Well, among other things, it means the marketers are fresh out of new ideas. 

The space gimmick has been done. What can be the next frontier of the advertising stunt? According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the Earth’s surface is more than 70% water, and yet 80% of the oceans remain unexplored and unmapped. Both the moon and Mars have been completely mapped. 

In 2017, the Nippon Foundation partnered with the General Bathymetric Chart of Oceans to launch Seabed 2030, a global project to produce a definitive map of the entire world’s oceans by 2030. Now that sounds like a branding opportunity. It’s like space, but y’know, wet. And they could probably use some mayo.