Space adventuress and newly-minted superblogger Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides (of Yuri’s Night and Space Generation) wants to know if you can come up with a better slogan for NASA:
In early August, NASA internally released its latest marketing campaign, designed to show its relevance and value to the American people. Its new slogan? “NASA explores for answers that power our future.” The campaign now seems to be aborted, but it did get me thinking, could we do any better?
I am no marketing genius, but I think that we could. I mean North Face’s has much more zing, “Never Stop Exploring.” Even Dow Chemicals did better, “The Human Element.”Now, I know that NASA does not have the massive budget that these companies do to hire super star advertising execs. I also know that a lot of people at NASA put a lot of time and thought into this new campaign and so I don’t want to criticize it without offering up some constructive alternatives. Therefore, I am turning to cyberspace and the power of crowdsourcing to come up with some alternatives to offer them. One of the issues they cite in their market research is a challenge being relevant to people 18-24. Maybe we could help. I will even throw in prizes.
The writer of the best slogan will get a DVD of the space movie of their choice, From the Earth to the Moon, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc and will be interviewed for a follow up posting on what it takes to engage the public with space. Other noteworthy submission will get other small space swag.
Link to the full text of Loretta’s call to keyboards, and submissions should are due by Sept 28th. The Wired folks have created a new submissions tool, so go ahead and use that to plug in your ideas: Link