This week, condiment brand Sir Kensington’s (part of Unilever’s portfolio) announced its desire to travel far and wide, launching a petition for NASA to consider stocking its products on all its missions. The brand has created a “Proposal Pack” of various products, hoping to impress the space agency, given that human taste has atrophied significantly from our orbit.
Chris Symmes, Unilever North America’s senior marketing director of sauces and condiments, said in a statement: “If our purpose is to help everyone everywhere ‘Obey the Tongue’ and experience extraterrestrial flavors, then we can’t stop at Earth’s atmosphere… Flavor.” “We are excited to see where this offering goes, without leaving the enthusiast behind.”
Universe-targeting condiments weren’t the only brands with space plans this week. In a now-deleted Instagram post, a giant Oreo, Close Encounters style, was photographed floating above the city skyline with the caption, “A new Oreo cookie is about to land.” We know that the Mondelez-owned cookie brand is planning to return to the Super Bowl to celebrate a decade since the “dunk the darkness” tweet that has seemingly become canonized knowledge among social media marketers.
In 2021, Miller Original Draft threatened to launch a new seltzer along with every other beer brand at the time, but then zagged and pretended to launch real seltzer into space instead. Because if you want to grab people’s attention in this Attention economy, one surefire way to at least raise an eyebrow is to mention the field.
It’s been over two years since my last rant against space advertising, and yet we’re still stuck in this creative black hole. If we take a moonwalk down memory lane, you’ll remember that in 2018, Elon Musk (you know, the guy who hates ads and calls himself Tesla’s Technoking cool and fun) launched a Tesla Roadster driven by a mannequin into orbit. Starman’s name. A year ago, KFC sent a Chicken Zinger sandwich into the stratosphere. In 1999, Pizza Hut paid nearly $1 million to have its logo plastered on the side of a Russian Proton rocket launched to the International Space Station. In 1996, Coca-Cola had a custom-made soda dispenser on the shuttle, Endeavor, while Pepsi reportedly paid the Russian space agency $5 million to have a cosmonaut hold a can of it during a spacewalk. In 1984 (40 years ago!) NASA put both Coke and Pepsi cans on the space shuttle as an experiment.
Add to this the multitude of advertisements that do not actually threaten to go into space, but use images of it as part of selling guaranteed products that have nothing to do with space, and the question arises: Are we really that obsessed as a culture? with space? What does it mean when a soda or a pizza, a cookie or a jar of mayonnaise evokes mystery and wonder? Among other things, this means marketers are fresh off new ideas.
The space trick was done. What could be the next frontier in advertising? According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), more than 70% of the Earth’s surface consists of water, and yet 80% of the oceans remain unexplored and uncharted. Both the Moon and Mars have been completely mapped.
In 2017, the Nippon Foundation partnered with the General Bathymetric Ocean Chart to launch Seabed 2030, a global project that aims to create a definitive map of all the world’s oceans by 2030. Now this looks like a branding opportunity. It looks like space but, you know, it’s wet. And they could probably use some mayonnaise.