Co-author Richard Jurek was recently interviewed about Marketing the Moon on national public radio in Australia on ABC's The List program, with Cassie McCullagh. Click through on the picture below to go to the story's write-up, as well as a link to the replay.
Click on the image above to access the article and to access the radio interview replay.
A wonderful podcast interview with David Meerman Scott at Marketing Over Coffee about Marketing the Moon. Provides a deep-dive discussion into many of the lessons for modern day practitioners of marketing and PR can learn from studying the Apollo program.
We have been honored to be named this week to two very influential Top 10 book lists, across two categories: Science and Tech, and Marketing and Communications.
Jason Falls listed Marketing the Moon on his Top 10 list of books to inspire and inform marketers and communicators. And we loved his enthusiasm for the book: "These two guys wrote an entire book about one case study? Hell, yes they did. And it is fantastic. Almost a coffee table book with beautiful pictures, historic advertisements and more, Marketing The Moon is a granular look at how NASA and the U.S. Government’s most majestic feat was also the most successful marketing and public relations campaign of all time, to date. From Disney’s sci-fi propaganda to the thickness of the Cold War to capturing the imaginations of an entire country, David and Richard do an incredible job of breaking it down and giving you inspiration to build your own awesomeness. Let’s put it this way: It’s a marketing and PR book and my two children love looking at the pictures. It might be the first book of our industry to cross into mainstream consciousness." Glad to see the kids lovin' it, too!
We were equally as thrilled to see that The Guardian newspaper in the UK named Marketing the Moon to its list of the Top 10 science and technology books for April -- just in time for the London Book Fair!
Marketing the Moon co-author Richard Jurek recently visited the set of the popular "Chicago Tonight" nightly news show on PBS hosted by Phil Ponce. The program also conducted a wonderful online Q&A with co-author David Meerman Scott to complete the perspective on the book from both authors. It was a great visit in the studio, talking about the book's themes, highlighting some personal artifacts that flew to the moon, and answering questions about NASA's need today for a global imperative to focus a fragmented audience base for support.
This fragmented approach is currently NASA's greatest challenge from a marketing and communications perspective. NASA has a great communications and public relations staff. They create tons of amazing content and know social media marketing, cold. NASA of today has hundreds of programs competing for audience attention and support, unlike during Apollo when there was just one major program dominating the news. Without a mandate to market, and with such a fragmented content array, it is almost impossible to create a ground swell of support like was generated during the laser-focused days of Apollo.
Bob Jacobs, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Communications in Washington, D.C., pointed out to Richard, after viewing the Chicago Tonight video interview: "You are so dead-on in the last part of that interview. And as you clearly pointed out, the resources today are a fraction of what they were in the heyday of Apollo. Add that to (the mix), and you capture the scope of our challenge."
Indeed, the challenge is embedded in NASA's operational structure and mandate -- with Congress and the White House holding the responsibility to set NASA's agenda. It has been this way since the agency's formation.
"People think we (NASA) need to go out and sell America’s space program. I don’t see that as my job. The President proposes and Congress disposes (i.e, accept or rejects, positions and funds). In fact, it’s frowned upon when someone suggests it’s NASA’s job to make space popular with the American people."
As NASA's 1958 charter indicates, it is NASA's job to disseminate information, just as Walter Bonney, Julian Scheer, Shorty Powers, Paul Haney, and the legion of Public Affairs officers, both past and present, have done and continue to do, admirably. They produce brilliant content. It is a reminder that the outside world often judges NASA as if it were a private company like Coca-Cola or Pepsi, where marketing (within a marketing-driven, packaged goods product management infrastructure) has a larger say in a company's strategic direction. And they forget that NASA must operate within the strict guidelines of its governing operational mandate.
"I frame it this way," says Jacobs. "My job isn’t to sell anything. My job is to clean the windows so America gets a better view of its space program."
We recently sat down with Chris Gondek and had a chat about Marketing the Moon. You can hear the full interview by clicking on the picture below. The podcast was sponsored by The MIT Press.
Gizmodo recently ran an excerpt from Marketing the Moon that has generated thousands of reads, and a lot of enthusiasm for the book. Read Being a Celebrity Astronaut is Tougher Than it Looks, which is taken from the chapter titled "In a Different Orbit: The Astronauts As Celebrities."
Michelle Legro, editor at Lapham's Quarterly, recently reviewed Marketing the Moon for the wonderful Brian Pickings website. Check out the review by clicking on How NASA Sold Space to Earth, and start following Brain Pickings on Twitter, Facebook, and the web.
David and I were honored to be interviewed about Marketing the Moon by award winning journalist and author Bruce Dorminey for Forbes. We explored many topics, from brand journalism and NASA's current approach to marketing. Check it out by clicking on How NASA Sold Us The Moon.
The successes of Apollo would not have been possible, obviously, without the pioneering and daring efforts of both the Mercury and the Gemini space programs, which paved the way in technology, training, and development for Apollo. These missions also established the astronauts as heros within the popular culture, and set the tone within the press for future coverage...a tone which placed the astronauts not only at the vanguard of the Cold War, but also for press freedom.
The following video is from February 20, 1962, and it is the Universal International News Reel coverage of John Glenn's Mercury flight, in which Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth....a short while after the same was accomplished by Yuri Gagarin for the Soviet Union. It is a vintage news reel -- filled with dramatic music on par with the best of Hollywood productions, and the booming, authoritative voice of Ed Herlihy. For those who watch vintage films of WWII or early space news reels, his voice will sound very familiar. Herlihy worked for Universal Newsreels in the 1940s, and he narrated news reels describing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Allies' early setbacks against the Axis powers, the turning of the tide of WWII, the death of President Roosevelt, and the detonation of the first atomic bombs. In the next decade, during the Cold War, he narrated the very first American newsreel on the launch of Sputnik. His is a voice of the era.
Today, people often forget that the US space program was born out of a time of war and conflict, and the global geopolitical tensions of the Cold War. An important aspect of the US program for many around the world was that it was conducted as an "open program" -- i.e., presented the news in a real-time fashion and did not cloak it in secrecy and allowed as much full access as possible given the time. In Marketing the Moon, we explore the internal policy struggles and the formation of this open program approach -- which, like so many things with the Apollo program, was developed as a work-in-progress.
Watch this vintage news reel and feel yourself transported back in time, to a moment, in the words of Ed Herlihy, "when the eyes of the world turn to Cape Canaveral" and when "the Russian orbits were in a thick fog of secrecy" and "The United States stands or falls on the white hot glare of world wide publicity."
Walter Cronkite's coverage of the historic flight of Apollo 8 -- the first manned flight to the moon -- on December 21, 1968 on CBS News is a showcase of how the media, NASA, and NASA's contractors worked together to "tell the story" to the American public and the world about the Apollo program. When you watch the above clip, note the extended amount of coverage versus today's more "sound byte" world, as well as the amount of time Cronkite spends educating the audience about what they are about to witness and see. NASA did not have a huge media machine to create this kind of outreach, and leveraged the world's journalists to tell their story -- journalists who were hungry for information about Apollo because of its drama and newsworthiness and the hunger of their audiences for experiencing the historic events in real-time. NASA public affairs (and the contractor marketing and PR folks) spent a lot of time educating the journalists, so the journalists could educate the public. Also notice the use of models and props, many of which were created by the very same contractors who supplied materials to NASA. As the rocket launches and ascends into space, Cronkite and his CBS crew switch over to animation slides and stills to approximate the activities that their cameras could not see. We also want you to particularly pay attention to the similes used by Cronkite to get across to the public the magnitude of the mission, the machines, and what they are about to witness.
