Ad Astra Advertising
It must be nice to be a brand marketer. Brand marketers have all the fun of creating advertising without assuming any of the responsibility for generating results.
Consider a branding effort by Doritos which is expected to launch June 12. That’s an actual launch date, not a campaign debut date.
On that day, Frito-Lay will beam a 30-second Doritos commercial from a 500-megahertz ultrahigh-frequency radar into outer space. The target audience is whoever or whatever lives in a solar system within the Ursa Major constellation.
Only a brand-focused advertiser would go into a new market with as little information as Frito-Lay apparently has. Any intergalactic direct marketer would refuse to roll out such a campaign without at least a 10,000-planet test panel (or more, if the marketer wanted to evaluate variations in creative copy and offer).
So what does brand marketer Frito-Lay know about its audience? Well, Ursa Major is 42 light-years from Earth. The constellation was chosen because 47 Ursae Majoris, a star within the constellation, has similar characteristics to our sun, and is orbited by planets that could have life forms similar to us. Note that by
