Market Me To The Moon: Our Marketing Takeaways From The 'Fly Me To The Moon' Movie

I'm a little late to the game, but I finally watched Fly Me To the Moon, with Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, and Woody Harrelson. This movie was supposed to be a Rom-Com, but as you know, we can never turn off our marketing brains as social media managers, so we are officially declaring it a marketing movie.

This story follows the hiring of marketing and public relations expert, Kelly Jones, on her journey to market the moon, aka, the Apollo 11 mission. While not all of this movie follows the real, historical storyline, we want to highlight its points about marketing specifically within this movie — the good and bad!

Spoiler alert, if you haven't seen it, yet, there's some serious tea spilled in this blog, so go back and watch it first before reading.

Marketing Lessons Learned From Fly Me To The Moon

Building Interest

In the beginning of the movie, we see that the public does not have a good image of the upcoming mission to the moon, and politicians followed that, too. Which means, there wasn't enough funding or support coming in. When Kelly came in, this was her first mission. She built interest in the subject by getting people informed and talking about it. Let this be a lesson, when you have a "launch," even when it's not quite the capacity of a literal launch to the moon, it's still important to build excitement and audience interest, no matter what you are marketing!

Adapting To Your Audience

Not everyone has dreams to go to space or an interest in learning about it at all. But, Scarlett's character, Kelly, was able to speak to the American people in ways NASA did not do in their previous missions and changed people's perspectives in the process. We see her character constantly adapting her own personality to fit the mold of whoever she was talking to: the American people, senators, or the NASA team. And while we don't suggest going full con-woman style with your marketing, it's important to find interest points and talk to your audience. Right from the beginning when she was pitching her Mustang with seatbelts campaign, you could tell she had the target market always in the back of her mind and playing an influence into the campaigns she was working on.

Creative Campaigns

To be able to spin a breakfast brand or watch into something like the space race has to be creative! She took a unique approach to whatever she was marketing. She made the astronauts influencers of their era with their brand deals and found a great alternative income that generated buzz, too.

Storytelling

While I'm still a little upset that they glazed over the narratives they covered, like the people behind NASA and the town itself (tell me your gears didn't grind when they were in the dinner learning about the NASA stories and they didn't do any campaigns with this?!). I still think the story that was told was powerful throughout the entire film. Right when she starts, you'll recall her going to the engineers to get their stories. And, when she isn't able to use the real people on TV to tell their stories, she still finds a way to tie in their stories. While this part was a bit more dramatic that we would recommend, she still was able to captivate people with the narrative. She then focuses on making the rocket launch an experience. She shows that this town is more than just a rocket launch location, it's a destination where people can come together and build their story into Apollo 11's and history.

Marketing Strategies We Didn't Love in The Movie

Deceptive Marketing

While this was such a great movie for feeding into this conspiracy theory that's been alive for years, there are a few things that we didn't love from a marketing lens. One thing about this movie is that it really highlights how marketing has changed over the years. Despective marketing tactics were few and far between during this era, whereas now we lean more into authenticity. I'm sure we've all heard of a few campaigns from back in the day, like Sigmund Freud's Torches of Freedom cigarette campaign, that led to misleading their audience into purchasing decisions. While we won't say every company has given up on these types of marketing strategies, we will say, it's definitely OUT in our book. If you have a great product or service you believe in, relying on creative campaigns to make your product/service's benefits come to light will be 1000x better than anything deceptive.

Authenticity

This movie is a comedy, so we won't take it too seriously, but we need to bring to attention that audiences don't want the overly curated, fake moon setups anymore. Which is why it was so exciting to see that they ended the film in the way they did. Over the years, we've continued to lean into this. Audiences want the real, the raw, and the.... really real! This is why you see behind-the-scenes content and influencers coming into the forefront of marketing strategies in recent years.

Now, we are on to reading the book (Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program), we'll let you know if we have any new findings after reading about the real thing!