We really are making ourselves at home in space, with junk, rovers, plans for construction… and now, advertisements.
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In one CGI-led surrealist campaign, London’s Big Ben was “clad” in a North Face puffer jacket.
Last month, the 13-ft-tall, six-legged Odysseus lander became the first American spacecraft on the moon in more than 50 years. And the first private vessel to make a successful lunar landing in human history. Launched by the space company Intuitive Machines, it had a turbulent landing, lost a leg, almost lost its way, and survived only a week. But in that time,
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The marketing agency Sent Into Space has dispatched a smoothie-maker , branded ketchup, and a single chicken nugget, among other things, into the upper stratosphere, as part of promotional campaigns.
Surrealist advertising is a sub-genre that hinges on computer-generated imagery (CGI) designed to make it look as if products have taken over landmarks in the real world.
In this manner, brightly coloured Jacquemus handbags have zipped through the streets of Paris, in an online ad. A dollop of toothpaste seemed to narrowly miss passersby outside the Isabel Marant men’s store, also in Paris.
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People gathered to look up at a Big Ben “clad” in a North Face puffer jacket. A single Tod’s shoe rolled down a street in Tuscany on little wheels. And, in Mumbai, large tubes of Fae lipstick lay tossed about on the street near Gateway of India.
It is hard to tell where this new race will lead. “The current use of space and surrealist advertising is a move backwards, to an age of trademark advertising when everyone flexed their brand identity through logos without focusing on messaging,” says KV Sridhar, an industry veteran and former chief creative officer at Leo Burnett India.
Brightly coloured Jacquemus handbags zipped through the streets of Paris, in a surrealist online ad campaign last year.
What does a CGI horse on a street (a surrealist Instagram campaign by the US restaurant chain PF Chang’s, to mark its debut in Mumbai), a larger-than-life mascara at a train station, or a cupcake atop a famous monument tell us about the brand’s value, Sridhar asks.
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“Gimmicks can draw attention, but they won’t create relatability, which is what every brand needs in order to sustain itself in the public memory.”
That could change in the next evolution, with both space and surrealist advertising likely to embrace augmented reality and holograms (where see-through spectres of the giant bags actually do bounce past you in the real world).
In January, for instance, Hugo Boss projected a 33-ft-tall hologram of the supermodel Gisele Bündchen and South Korean actor Lee Min-ho into thin air near London’s Tower Bridge, as a part of the promotional campaign for its 2024 Spring/Summer collection. Holographic billboards could feature see-through people and animations moving around, commenting on products, listing key features.
“We can expect a virtual layer on physical reality soon and a lot of it will be advertising,” says Santosh Desai, author and CEO of the brand consultancy Futurebrands. “Ironically, our virtual spaces may become more protected as we exert more control over them, but physical spaces will bear the brunt of the onslaught of new innovation and be encroached upon.”
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The Las Vegas Sphere, inaugurated in September, is an example of how advertising innovations can loom. The next step could be logos projected into the night sky, Desai says. Tech start-ups such as the Russian StartRocket have so far expressed intent but shelved their plans following a barrage of criticism.
“The pristine beauty of the hills has already been marred by huge advertising billboards,” Desai says. “The thought of not being able to look away from logos in the sky is horrifying.”
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