Marketing the Moon

Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program is a comprehensive look at the successes and the challenges of launching a massive marketing program. Marketing and communication managers will find countless insights into the pitfalls as well as the rewards of creating and nurturing their own initiatives... -Journal of Product & Brand Management I'd like to sing the praises of large-format, image-heavy historical books that are creative in approach and gorgeous to peruse.... As a gift for anyone who's interested in space or the history of advertising, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program by David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek will fascinate. The book chronicles the extensive effort made to get the Apollo program favorable press coverage, and to explain the science behind the effort to the public. (I ran images of two tracking wheels, distributed to press to provide technical context for the missions, on this blog in May.) Its pages include many reproductions of materials from press kits, television broadcasts, and advertisements. -Rebecca Onion, Slate If you're interested in the public affairs side of the Apollo era, I'd highly recommend Marketing the Moon. It dives into one of the least often discussed but vitally important aspects of bringing a lunar mission from concept to reality. -Amy Shira Teitel, Popular Science Something profound had changed since the early days of the heroic, untouchable space heroes. In Marketing the Moon, David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek do a masterful job defining that something and placing it within a much broader exploration of how the U.S. space program acquired such mythic status in the first place-before it abruptly, sadly crumbled away. Along the way, the authors achieve something I doubted was possible: They provide fresh and important insights into the Apollo program, nearly half a century after the fact. -Corey S. Powell, American Scientist Scott and Jurek devote a whole chapter of 'Marketing the Moon'-which, it should be noted, overflows with beautiful photographs, drawings, and illustrations-to the broadcast and reporting of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The main thing, they show, was that it was live-and that its liveness embodied, in itself, the bravery and risk of the mission. Gene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the moon, describes it this way: 'We didn't say, 'We'll tell you about it in two weeks.' We took you with us. The power of television is unbelievable. That's what television does. What you are seeing is happening at this instant. ... [T]he thing that brought so much prestige to this country is that every launch, every landing on the Moon, and every walk on the Moon was given freely to the world in real time. We didn't doctor up the movie, didn't edit anything out; what was said was said.' CBS covered the Apollo 11 landing for thirty-two continuous hours; it set up special screens in Central Park so that people could watch in a crowd. Ninety-four per cent of TV-owning American households tuned in. Without television, the moon landing would have been a merely impressive achievement-an expensive stunt, to the cynical. Instead, seen live, unedited, and everywhere, it became a genuine experience of global intimacy. -Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker U.S. government goes 'Mad Men' on Apollo, gets it right. -Tyler Cohen, New York Times Magazine Marketing the Moon records elegantly and precisely such details, but it tells an important and generally understated sociological story of how the Apollo program changed the way we see the world in a different sense too: it introduced new expectations of 'live television', of unedited audio transcripts, or direct access to experts and officials. All this openness was remarkable in the context of a space program launched in the shadow of the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion and driven by the military's need to 'beat the Russians'. -The Philosopher The book is a highly illustrated tour-de-f

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist and the author of three bestselling books, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Real-Time Marketing, and Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. He lives in Lexington, Massachuetts. Richard Jurek has worked as a marketing and public relations executive for more than twenty years. He lives in Chicago. Gene Cernan is a retired United States Navy officer and a former NASA astronaut. He has been into space three times: as pilot of Gemini 9, as lunar module pilot of Apollo 10, and as commander of Apollo 17, the final Apollo lunar landing. He was the last man to set foot on the moon.