Book review: Marketing the Moon

Public relations practitioners and space nuts alike should check out the new book Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program. If you’re both, like myself and authors David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek, you’ll enjoy it doubly so. The book details the public relations and marketing efforts that supported the Apollo program and the race to the Moon during the 1960s.

Especially interesting to me from the PR standpoint was the extent to which NASA and scores of contractors were able to pull in the same direction while helping to tell the tale of the people and the equipment that made the Moon landings possible and popular. Whether their particular piece of the quest was a rocket booster, a wristwatch, or a powdered breakfast drink, participants in the space program were able to share in the attention generated by Apollo without going so far as to say that Neil Armstrong endorsed Tang.

Also fascinating to me, as a former radio reporter who worked for mostly resource-strapped stations (is there any other kind?), was the tale of one small-town station reporter’s efforts to cover the Moon shots on the cheap. He filed his stories using the broadcast equivalent of baling wire and bubble gum.

Marketing the Moon is a large-format volume and a handsome, highly visual one, with lots of Apollo-era photos, print advertisements, and samples of public relations materials used by the various participants in the space program.

I’ve long been of the opinion that NASA public relations has been top-notch. I’ve spoken with former NASA administrator Michael Griffin and space historian Roger Launius about the notion that NASA PR may actually have been too good. Polling shows that people support NASA, but they also believe that its budget is too high, at least in part because they also have a greatly exaggerated impression of what the agency’s budget actually is.

That said, Marketing the Moon is also the story of public relations failure. While the race to the Moon was staggeringly popular, and Armstrong’s giant leap was watched by billions of people around the globe, the buzz didn’t last. Once the race was won, interest flagged among both the media and the public. One can debate which got bored first, but ultimately the attention span wasn’t there. The final three scheduled Apollo missions were canceled, and while missions such as the Mars rovers, and particularly the amazing landing of Curiosity on Mars two years ago, have generated some interest, we haven’t come close to the mania achieved by the effort to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth.

Marketing the Moon is a recommended read.