Aug 14, 2008

Greatest Space Ads - Part II - Pizza Hut on the ISS

In 2000, to promote the debut of its new logo, Pizza Hut paid about $1 million to put a 9m version of their new emblem on the side of the Russian Proton rocket that carried the International Space Station's Zvezda service module, one of the core modules of the Russian segment of the station. It was expected that around 500 million people would see the launch. Pizza Hut originally planned to use lasers to shine a giant logo on to the surface of the moon, but they started looking for an alternative promotional idea when they learnt that this was not technicallyl feasible due to the distance from the Earth. (see Space.com 30 September, 1999).

There were many legal and contractual problems with the deal (see Space.com, 12 June, 2000) but the logo, along with the Zvezda module, was finally launched on July 12, 2000. In the end, Khrunichev space centre got only $150,000 of the fee, the rest going to the consultants - Russian advertising company Planeta Zemlya (Planet Earth) and two US companies, Space Marketing Inc and Globus Space, who developed the public relations campaign (see SpaceDaily, 8 July, 2000).

As part of the same advertising campaign, Pizza Hut also launched a pizza to the ISS, which the Cosmonauts baked in their on-board oven. Pizza Hut announced the safe arrival of the pizza in May 2000 (see Space.com, 22 May, 2000). Presumably the pizza was delivered by the NASA Space Shuttle Flight STS-101, although NASA appears not to have publically acknowledged this fact. Space.com released this informative video about the pizza delivery ad:




Previously in our "Greatest Space Ads" section:

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