An all-too-brief article in BizCommunity.com ( “South Africa’s leading daily advertising, marketing and media news resource for the industry!”) reports that a South African advertising firm is contemplating advertising to SpaceShipTwo passengers—in flight. Details are sketchy, but apparently Net#work BBDO (yes, the “#” character is part of their name), which is Virgin’s ad agency in South Africa, would like to create some sort of suborbital billboard for SS2 passengers to view during their flight (because, of course, they’ll have absolutely nothing else to do during their trip to space, evidently.) According to Net#work BBDO’s creative executive director, Julian Watt: “So, given that Virgin’s plan is to send a passenger airplane into space; shouldn’t there be some advertising right up there with them? Why can’t there be a space billboard to read?… Never before has a billboard roamed the stratosphere for commercial consumption.”
How exactly are they going to pull this off? The report says that the ad agency has sent a letter to NASA, which Watt calls “our official appeal to NASA to set in motion our project plan to engineer, build and launch the idea.” The fact that they’re contacting NASA suggests that the ad agency really has no clue about this: exactly why would the US space agency help a South African company build a “space billboard”? Unfortunately, perhaps because space is so closely linked to NASA around the world regardless of the activity, the unnamed reporter of the article doesn’t question this assertion, or even contact NASA for comment.
Oh, yes that’s what the world needs – more space junk! Now, if the company marketed to these space tourists *before* flight, that would make some sense.
Do Americans and NASA own space?!?