Ask YC: Moonvertising, is it coming?

[dkokelley]

There is a billboard in my home town that has a cryptic message about watching the next full moon, and it provided a website to go along with it: moonvertising.com.

It appears that Rolling Rock Beer is behind this somehow. I was curios to see if it was a marketing hoax or if it was actually possible (and going to happen).

My question to HN is this: Is something like this possible? How would it work, and what would be required for it to work? I did some googling and found out that Coca Cola wanted to try this once but was prohibited because of the risk of the lasers blinding pilots or having other adverse consequences. (http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/departments/features/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003556617)

What do you guys think about this? Following Coca Cola's lessons, would a laser fired from a satellite work?

[hugh]

Hmm. Back of the envelope calculation:

In order to project something on the moon to have it visible during a full moon, you'd want the projection to be at least as bright as the sunlight hitting the full moon (about 1 kW per square metre).

In order to have a readable logo you'd probably need it to cover at least, say, 1% of the moon's visible surface area (about 9 million square km).

So that's 9e12 * 1000 * 0.01, or about 9e13 watts, which happens to be about fifty times more power than is produced by all the power plants in the world put together.

So I'm thinking that's a no.

[pg → hugh]

It wouldn't have to be visible to the naked eye. For Coke's purposes it would be enough for it to show up in highly magnified photos. And once the logo gets smaller you can project it into the shadow of a crater rim. You'd want to put a small logo next to a crater anyway, since otherwise it wouldn't look moony enough in a magnified shot.

...this feels alarmingly like what I do in my day job.

[dkokelley → pg]

Hmm. I think they actually had it in mind to have it visible to the naked eye. Imagine a perfectly round, full moon with the coke bottle right in the center. I think that's what they were going for.

[brlewis → dkokelley]

If someone built a laser powerful enough to illuminate tens of thousands of square miles, advertising would be the least of our worries.

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/SamuelBernard1.shtml

[randrews → hugh]

Okay, so what about projecting on to a new moon instead? You'd need a lot less brightness; aside from not having to be brighter than the sun, it's naturally darker at night with a new moon...

[mixmax]

We thought about something better a few years back.

If you have a satellite with a reflective surface of roughly 1m2 you can make it look like a star when it is in low earth orbit. The reflective surface can be made out of space grade cellofan, and unfolded when it reaches orbit. Now if you have 50 satellites like this and are able to position them relative to one another (this is the tricky part) you can make a logo with 50 stars that will blaze across the night sky. You can even reposition them to create other logos.

We did a short feasibility study, and it is possible, but quite expensive.

Would be pretty cool though..

[cstejerean]

"Drink enough beer and you'll see our logo on the moon"

Being able to use the moon as an advertising billboard would be an interesting achievement. I somehow doubt it will happen anytime soon though and I'm curious of other details like who is in charge of regulating advertising on the moon?

[emfle]

Reminds me of this old joke:

- Mr. President! The Russians have landed on the moon, and they are busy painting it red!

- No problem. When they are done, we will just write "Drink Coca-Cola" in big white letters.

[scooter53080]

maybe some kind of orbiting device that filters light...like shadow puppets on the moon. ;-)