Recently I had noticed an advertisement from Rolling Rock, a beer company, about something called "moonvertising"; the billboard said to watch the next full moon.
Naturally, I was curious and did some brief research on the concept.
As the image on the left suggests, the company had planned to project their logo onto the moon on the next full moon. An array of powerful lasers would be more than easy to set up to do this: Coca Cola had tried to do this in 1999. Coke's representative later said that it was completely planned out and that their scientists had done out the math and said it would work, but the FAA clamped down on them, issuing a cease-and-desist order, fearing that airplanes running through the laser would be "cut in half."
Rolling Rock knew this too, according to a spokesman. They said they were going to project their logo at first, and I suspect they may have gone along with it if the FAA didn't step in again, but the FAA did stop them; I think that's what they were planning on all along. In order to skirt a false advertising lawsuit, the original intent is would still be there as a fallback, a wise decision on their part if that's what they had been meaning to do. Now, the whole moonvertising thing can live on as another Rolling Rock hoax, of which they already have done several.
Still, all of this is disappointing. It really would be cool if some company invested the time and effort to actually project their logo on the moon. Now, the only way that it could legally be done would be to launch a satellite with the projection module mounted on it, which would probably also quickly be noticed by the FAA or NASA. However, space is a totally free zone; no country could stop anyone with all their equipment in space. To forcibly disable the satellite would constitute an act of war against the owner corporation.
I'd bet that someone is going to try the whole thing again in a few years, though perhaps this time, they might rent out a spot on the next Iridium communications satellite going up.
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