Google Lunar X PRIZE: White Label Space Now An Official Team! May 13, 2009
Posted by Nick Azer in : brand, Google Lunar X Prize , trackback
White Label Space was announced last week as the latest official Google Lunar X PRIZE team!
They’ve been around a while, preparing since March 2008 with blogging and twittering and other goodness to go along, but are just now an official team.
The curious name comes from the concept of a white-label product—a currently brandless product ready for another company to step in with a brand ready and apply it.
“With a strong background in space engineering and knowledge of the costs involved, the group realized that there were numerous global companies that could finance a Google Lunar X PRIZE mission with less than 10% of their yearly advertising expenditure.”- “White Label Space Joins Google Lunar X PRIZE”, official team blog, 5/8/09
A strong brand can have a tremendous impact on public relations, for both the team itself and its partners—as David Gump of Astrobotic recently attested to:
“A vision for Astrobotic grew out of long-time collaborations between Gump and Whittaker, starting back in 1989 when Gump headed the now-defunct Lunacorp and had plans to place a rover on the moon. ‘At that time we didn’t have the credibility of Google dust sprinkled on us,’ Gump said.” -”Private Moon Rover Aims for Apollo 11 Landing Site“, Space.com
Attracting outright (as White Label Space puts it) ”one or more of the biggest brands in the world” would give them that ‘Google dust’ for both a significant assist towards their mission’s cost (not unlike, say, for an expensive ballpark), and a significant boost to their credibility/visibility—especially outside space circles (where the X PRIZE and moon colonization in general are, in my experiences, virtually unknown).
It’ll be interesting to see who White Label Space manages to round up—I’m rooting for Disney/Pixar to roll in with a WALL-E tie-in, or for Starwood to embrace its name and go boldly where no hotel has gone before ;)
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