Doesn't The Moon Look Beautiful Tonight, Honey? Hey, Do We Have Any Beer In The Fridge?

If Rolling Rock’s ads are to be believed, guerilla marketing will leave its earthly confines this week when the brewery tries projecting its corporate logo onto the moon’s surface with a laser beam. Is this for real? Is it a hoax? Do they really have the technology to do this thing? Will we need a telescope or can we enjoy the show with the naked eye? And most importantly, can the whole thing be stopped??

I thought the nightmare of high tech advertising was the retina scanning portrayed in “Minority Report,” where people couldn’t go anywhere without being scanned, identified, and then bombarded with personal ads based on their recorded purchase history. But that nightmare is reserved for the future, a bleak future in which a heavily-armed Tom Cruise flies around in a jetpack. The laser beam plan is here and now, and it’s so brilliantly simple. Make the boring old moon a huge cosmic billboard for corporate America to light up nightly with ads for Target or Ford or Pizza Hut (because, if successful, little Rolling Rock will be quickly elbowed to the side by bigger companies with bigger laser beams). Beautiful logos just shining there for the entire hemisphere to enjoy. Is that a “Harvest Moon?” No, it’s a “Harvest of Values Moon,” from your True Value Hardware Store. Sea of Tranquility? That’s what awaits you at America’s Best Western motels.

According to their website, Rolling Rock will also be beaming messages, or has already been beaming messages, requested by pretty much anyone who asks. Here’s one by Joe from Buffalo, New York, that was aimed at the Crater Plinius: “Let’s go Sabres! Buffalo Sabres Rock!“ I am not making this up. Some of history’s greatest poets like Byron, Shelly and Coleridge, have written a beautiful verse or two about the moon. Now we have Joe from Buffalo. Writing on the moon.

America doesn’t own the moon, even though we personally planted a flag on it long ago (in part so that MTV might one day have something cool to use for its logo). And according to Wikipedia, the U.S. and Russia signed a treaty that places the moon under the same jurisdiction as international waters, and restricts its use to peaceful purposes. Unfortunately, a second treaty, one that deals with lunar property rights and forbids one nation from exploiting the moon’s resources, has not been signed.

Maybe it’s time to revisit that issue. I know Congress has other priorities, which is how it should be, but this is a long-term problem in the making. If the Rolling Rock experiment is successful, it’s going to be uber-cool. For about 10 seconds. And then the prospect of never seeing the moon in its natural state again will sink in. And then it’s going to suck.

I don’t know what the mysterious “33” on the Rolling Rock bottle stands for, but for me it’ll represent the number of times I’ll want to kick Ron, Rolling Rock’s congenial marketing spokesperson, in his ass if this thing leads to a permanent orbiting ad campaign.