In March, advertisements for Rolling Rock began appearing on TV and on highway billboards trumpeting a bold new breakthrough. According to the ads, during the next full moon the company planned to use lasers to project its logo roughly 238,000 miles into space, where it would appear on the lunar surface, visible to earthly imbibers. They called it “moonvertising.”

Even before the first full moon came and went, with no sign of an extraterrestrial billboard, people began to suspect the obvious — moonvertising was a hoax, part of a viral marketing campaign created by the Goodby, Silverstein & Partners agency. As far-out as the concept sounds, a real moonvertising campaign was actually tried a few years ago by a marketing executive at Coca-Cola named Steve Koonin. Koonin read an article about how scientists measure the distance between earth and the moon using lasers and wanted to harness the technology to capture worldwide attention for Coke during Y2K. “In success it would be stupendous,” recalls Koonin, now president of Turner Entertainment Network. “Even in failure they’d be talking about you for a while.” Koonin hired scientists, and a few hundred thousand dollars was spent in development, but the plan collapsed because of logistical issues.

According to Jim Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, moonvertising is possible, if impractical for a number of reasons. While scientists have bounced lasers off the moon, they illuminated an area only about the size of a tennis court. “In order for an advertisement to be seen by people on earth,” Garvin says, “the laser light would need to cover an area about half the land size of Africa,” a challenge because the moon’s surface is dark and fairly nonreflective.

But should Madison Avenue get serious about Rolling Rock’s spoof campaign and launch a Kennedy-esque program to send an ad to the moon, Garvin theorizes that moonvertising “might take a decade to develop and cost somewhere between a big-budget movie and a week in Iraq.”