Did you miss the NASA rocket crash into the Moon on live television Friday morning? Don't worry, you didn't miss anything. Nothing happened.
It was totally cool from a conceptual standpoint: a rocket had been put into orbit around the Moon over three months ago and, at the click of a button, it was directed headfirst into a crater near the South Pole. A spacecraft named LCROSS was sent right behind it, ready to measure the billowing plume of gunk that the crashed rocket would throw into space, before itself crashing into the Moon's surface. The primary goal was to determine if there's water buried under the surface; it's an early part of something called the Constellation program, which will use moon bases to launch manned missions to Mars.
The animated versions of the crashes looked like video game combat. You could just imagine the kapow!, even though there's no sound in the vacuum of space. Classrooms around the country tuned in. People made a party of it and spent the night prior outside, ready to catch the impact on their telescopes. TV stations carried the moment of impact live, as I caught it on MSNBC.
Nothing happened.
There was this "3, 2,1..." thing and then silence. I could hear the scientists congratulating themselves, and then we saw some nerds in a small room smile and miss high-fives with one another (the setting was a far cry from the bridge of the starship Enterprise, let alone mission control for the Apollo missions). The TV hosts awkwardly transitioned back to regular programming. Kids went back to their books.
It was only after the fact that experts commented that the collision happened, and that it was a success. Telemetry (or whatever) needs to get crunched (or whatever), but those in the know were thrilled with the mission. The problem is that they weren't the target audience.
It was a yawn for the rest of us. Worse, it was a disappointment. Tell me that NASA didn't recognize the possibility that there'd be no awe-inspiring, visible explosion?
You wouldn't know it from the lead-up to the event, though. Between the animation and hype, you'd think NASA fully expected fireworks. I can understand its desire to hope for a big event. It repeatedly tries, and fails, to make space exploration more engaging. I'm a committed supporter of manned space exploration, and it bugs me constantly that the agency promotes itself through boring, inert "gee, the wonder" educational nonsense a la a Carl Sagan special on public television, and not in the fast, easy to grasp, and engaging language and imagery familiar to people under the age of 65.
Throwing a bomb at the moon was exactly that sort of thing that would get people to look up from their smartphones and take notice. I think it would have been more exciting is NASA had promoted the idea that it didn't know what would happen.
Instead of promising a big boom, how about getting folks engaged in conversation about, and then experience of, a true unknown? There could have been votes for whether or not there'd be a plume. Kids could have submitted ideas of what the explosion would have sounded like, were there sound. Nobody would have been expecting anything in particular to happen on Friday, which means there would have been a lot less disappointment when nothing happened at all.
I commend NASA for doing something other than acting like the boring, short-sighted government agency that it is. But it did a crappy job of managing expectations for what could have been a really cool event.
The Bulb Asks:
- Do you spend the most marketing time focused on managing customer expectations, or making promises?
- Is one person's disappointment really a risk to the perceptions of a larger audience?
- Would it make more sense to talk about brands as 'narration' instead of 'promise?'
