Advertisements are essential for companies. We have seen large businesses go out of their way to make unusual advertisements that leave viewers awestruck. However, this new form of branding takes everything to the next level. A newly formed company from Russia, StartRocket, has set on providing billboards in space. Advertisers can have their ads being projected outside of the Earth’s atmosphere and in the outer space.
The company’s primary aim is to create a project where it is possible to develop humongous advertisements in the space that can be viewed from the surface on Earth. People can look at these advertisements just by looking above at the sky where they would be projected through the use of a satellite.
The satellite will create a display much like the constellations of stars to form an advertisement in the space. This display can be moved around the entire Earth and can be viewed by the Earth’s 7 billion population, giving a much bigger audience than any of the advertisement media created so far. The display covers an overall area of 50 square km and would be visible for a total of six minutes in one area.
This innovation could be ground-breaking and change the perception of advertisements as we know them. However, it has met with much criticism so far. People claim that the sky is public property and must not be used for advertising and branding purposes. We live in a world where advertisements float everywhere, whether it is digital media or print or just massive billboards on buildings.
Imagine going out of the house to enjoy the perfect sky view at night only to see a bright, flashy ad to interrupt your view and ruin it for you. This is what this kind of orbital display supports, and it is sure to destroy our natural sky view.
Astrologists around the world have criticized this and have given their reasons as to why this needs to be put down. A lot of them talking about the massive light pollution such a project would cause and how crowded space has been becoming over time because of the massive amounts of satellites being launched into it from all over the world.
Pepsi had been involved with this company in the initial testing project, but due to mass criticism, it has backed out from its collaboration with StartRocket and has revealed that they have no further plans of continuing with space advertisements.
As of right now, this project needs much funding to be launched, and the company expects a sum of $25M by October 2019 to work on its design and further intricacies. With so much of backlash it has been getting, it does not seem possible that we will see this project come to life at least for a long while. We will have to wait for further news on this.
Source: TechSpot, Astronomy (via: Popular Mechanics)