‘Fly Me to the Moon’ Points to the Past and Future of Moonshot Marketing

In a new movie titled “Fly Me to the Moon,” a marketing consultant played by Scarlett Johansson uses Tang breakfast drink, Crest toothpaste and Omega watches to give a publicity boost to NASA’s Apollo moon program.

The marketing consultant may be totally fictional. And don’t get me started on the fake moon landing that’s part of the screwball comedy’s plot. But the fact that the makers of Tang, Crest and Omega allied themselves with NASA’s brand in the 1960s is totally real.

More than 50 years later, those companies are still benefiting from the NASA connection, says Richard Jurek, a marketing and public relations executive in the Chicago area who’s one of the authors of “Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program.”

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Jurek says Tang sold poorly when it was introduced in the late 1950s. “But once it was announced that it was being used in the space program and marketed that way, it became a huge bestseller for them, and in fact, still sells more overseas — and is a multibillion-dollar brand today,” he says.

NASA also got something out of the arrangements: The easy-to-use Tang powder was well-suited for the astronauts to mix with water during their flights. The Crest team helped NASA come up with a type of toothpaste that astronauts could swallow rather than spit. And Omega made one heck of a chronograph for the astronauts.

But Jurek says the marketing campaign’s main players were contractors like Boeing, Martin Marietta and North American Rockwell. Those contractors, rather than NASA itself, gave the biggest commercial push to the Apollo program.

“There was a war going on,” he explains. “There were a lot of missile manufacturers who didn’t want to come home and talk to their families about, ‘Yeah, we built another missile that was being used in the war.’ But through the marketing of Apollo and marketing of what they were doing for NASA, they could come home and talk about, ‘Look, we’re helping Neil Armstrong, we’re helping NASA, we’re helping America get to the moon.’ And that was a feel-good message.”

NASA and its commercial partners rode a tsunami-scale wave of enthusiasm in the buildup to the first moon landing in 1969. But in the wake of the life-and-death drama that surrounded the crippled Apollo 13 mission in 1970, that wave quickly crashed. “It shifted from an adventure story and a geopolitical story into one that really was a geology story, about rocks and the formation of the Earth, and it became a much harder sell,” Jurek says.

Jurek says that could serve as a cautionary tale for future crewed missions to the moon, like the ones that NASA is planning for the latter half of the 2020s as part of its Artemis campaign (which is named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology).

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for space travel,” he says. “You see it in the SpaceX launches, and some of the gimmicks of whether you fly a Tesla into space — and you have all these GoPros around and everybody’s oohing and ahhing over the images. But then it becomes a very real thing when you ask somebody to actually pay for it, and pay for it with their tax dollars.”

For taxpayers who may be tempted to turn from oohing to booing, the lesson of the Apollo era is that many of the space program’s benefits are indirect and pay dividends over the course of decades.

“We’re benefiting from the Apollo program today, from those fundamental investments that were made in basic research and science and infrastructure … back in the ’60s and ’70s,” Jurek says. The advances in microcircuitry and satellite technology required for the Apollo program made it possible for Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to create multibillion-dollar businesses, he says.

And what can NASA learn? Jurek says the space agency is doing a good job of adapting to a media marketplace that’s more “tribe-focused and niche-focused” than it was during the Apollo era, due to the rise of the internet and social media. But he adds that NASA’s efforts to engage with the public “could maybe gain a lot more from having a bit more of that private-enterprise management of digital marketing, elevated beyond just social media.”

Jurek also gives a thumbs-up to the way NASA lets its astronauts build their own brands through social media. He says the space agency could take that a step further — perhaps by following the precedent that was set in the early 1960s, when the Mercury astronauts struck a deal with Life magazine for their personal stories.

“What the movie got right — and what NASA got right in the 1950s and 1960s — was turning the astronauts into the face of the program,” he says.. “By doing so, they personalized the missions, and gave people a personal connection to the astronauts in which they felt like they had a stake in their success.”

Could there be, for example, a Netflix documentary series about the next generation of spacefliers? Oh, wait … there’s already been such a series, focusing on the privately funded Inspiration4 orbital mission.

Jurek says the rise of private-sector space missions could dramatically change the space marketing game over the next five to 10 years.

“You’ll have a lot more commercialization, a lot more individual managing of brands and messaging. Sponsorships, if you will, of missions, and private contractors elevating their brands,” he says. “But I think the bigger question will be the cooperation between the various private organizations and the government entities who in many ways control and regulate access to things. For example, it’s illegal to own a moon rock from the Apollo program. It’s government property.”

If private astronauts start extracting resources from the moon — or if other countries such as China, Russia or India do the same — who decides who gets what? What if China beats the U.S. in the space marketing game?