Space Was an Out-of-Touch Client in Need of a New Brand Strategy. Meet Supercluster, Its New Creative Agency
Michael O’Donnell / Editor of the WNW Magazine
Space is undeniably cool and it’s undeniably cool to like space. Sci-fi films and franchises rule the box office. The NASA logo is fixed onto Target, H&M, and Urban Outfitters apparel and Nike basketball sneakers. Ariana Grande even released a song called “NASA.” And whenever there’s an actual real-life rocket launch, we stop whatever earthly task we’re in the middle of, grab all of our friends and coworkers, and gather around a screen to watch the history-making human feat of countdown and blast off.
Except that most of us don’t. Our collective reception to the actual space programs themselves is if anything a little too cool. The good news is it’s not our fault. There’s clearly a disconnect that’s allowing our excitement in something as awe, wonder, and adventure-inspiring as space exploration to drift off. And some more good news: Supercluster, a rich multipurpose content platform and your new best friend in space, is here to re-tether that connection and make humanity’s greatest story as entertaining, educational, and engaging as it deserves to be.
Started by the folks at GrandArmy and A24 with support from Dropbox, Supercluster launched last summer on the precipice of a new golden age of space exploration. What’s a creative agency like GrandArmy doing in the space news race? What they’re best at. Space needed a rebrand to tap into an audience that isn’t old enough to remember the Space Age’s inauguration on October 4th, 1957. Treating space like an out-of-touch client in need of a new visual identity, spokesperson, and marketing strategy is a heroic brief to take on. So I spoke with Eric Collins and Larry Pipitone, Partners at GrandArmy, to learn how the team has rallied around this self-initiated project, and what’s involved in a relaunch of space.
The Gulf Between Space & Public Perception
Since a lot of the GrandArmy team are self-described “space and sci-fi dorks,” the office conversations often shifted naturally to space news and NASA’s missions. Eric Collins recalls a particular moment back while working at Wieden+Kennedy when he noticed a narrative disconnect. “I remember trying to get people excited about some of the last shuttle missions and trying to figure out ways to livestream the launches. At every step, I was totally surprised by how little anybody cared. I couldn’t get anyone even interested enough to go to a conference room to watch a rocket launch, which I thought was pretty shocking. Here’s this amazing thing, and when you understand what's happening and what's at stake, it's undeniable and romantic and adventurous. It’s real-life science fiction.”
“I remember trying to get people excited about some of the last shuttle missions and trying to figure out ways to livestream the launches. At every step, I was totally surprised by how little anybody cared. I couldn’t get anyone even interested enough to go to a conference room to watch a rocket launch, which I thought was pretty shocking.”
There was a gulf between the public perception and the reality. In Collins’ eyes, there was also an opportunity. Where did the blame lie? Whose fault was it that most of us won’t dedicate much more than a blip of our attention span to something as undeniable, romantic, and adventurous as space travel? “It didn't seem like it was NASA’s fault. It wasn't the astronaut’s fault going to space. I didn't think it was even the fault of the people who didn't care. I mean, they just happened to not care. You can't fault them for that.”
It’s that the story wasn’t being told to the broader public and broader culture in a way that would captivate them. The narrative approach around the space program wasn’t convincing enough people that this was important, that the space program offers material benefits and equates to boundless human potential. GrandArmy’s hypothesis was pretty simple to prove; it didn’t require a mathematical formula to reveal that people weren’t interested enough. The moment arrived when the GrandArmy team decided space’s narrative shortcomings didn't have to be a conversation relegated to the sidelines over lunch at the office in between projects. In fact, branding space could fit in seamlessly with the kinds of brand strategy, voice, and identity projects that GrandArmy regularly takes on.
A New Storytelling Strategy for Space
“What do we do all day long? We run this company GrandArmy and we use the skillsets of this amazing team of talented people to craft engaging, compelling stories around what all these different brands or organizations are up to. Okay. Well, why don't we try to focus that pool of talent toward this thing that we really believe in, which is communicating to the public why what NASA and private space industries are doing is so important and, beyond being important, cool. Like undeniably cool. These men and women are strapping themselves to explosives and blasting into the cosmos. There's a way to tell that story. It happens to be super-amazing and undeniably badass in addition to being intellectually fascinating.”
Upon surveying the landscape of space coverage in the media, they realized they were onto something. Tech blogs were speaking to too narrow of an audience and leaving a lot to be desired when conveying the humanity that makes the space program run. For Supercluster, the next step in the process was determining the intended audience. They wanted to appeal to the most diehard space fans, but also create inroads to people who don’t yet realize they care about this subject, all without dumbing things down.
“These men and women are strapping themselves to explosives and blasting into the cosmos. There’s a way to tell that story. It happens to be super-amazing and undeniably badass, in addition to being intellectually fascinating.”
Human stories always have the capacity of bringing new audiences into distinct worlds with sometimes esoteric language. There were some proven examples of this that Supercluster referenced in building their voice and approach for space. First, they looked at the world of sports. Good luck explaining baseball box scores to someone not generally interested in sports. It’s not that they aren’t capable of comprehending the math; but the statistics mean so little without context. If you instead tell the story of Dock Ellis, a pitcher who in 1970 threw a no-hitter on LSD, there’s a human story that becomes a fascinating window into a new world. The minutiae of a pitcher’s job and resulting numbers suddenly becomes incredibly humanizing and also, in this instance, pretty nerve-wracking. The heyday of Vice News also came to mind for Supercluster. Their coverage of the Arab Spring was unlike anything you would have been able to see from major news outlets.
It isn’t like space had never seen this kind of human coverage. “Until the Challenger disaster in ‘86, space was a big part of culture, with space camp commercials on TV and astronauts on the news looking like rockstars.” Supercluster aims to renew that “space cowboy” spirit, with a voice grounded in design, art, and great storytelling. “We want to be your best friend in space,” Collins’ explains. “And so the way I always think about that is: Imagine your best friend was a chief scientist at NASA. And then when you read some crazy headline in the news, you call your friend and you're like, ‘Hey, wait, so what's going on?’ And then your best friend goes, ‘Okay, hang on, hang on. This shit is crazy. Listen to this…’ We want it to feel approachable, but not dumbed down. Accessible, smart, and finding ways to explain these topics to bring people in, but at the highest level. We would never want to be called out for having bad science in an article.”
“We want to be your best friend in space. And so the way I always think about that is: Imagine your best friend was a chief scientist at NASA. And then when you read some crazy headline in the news, you call your friend and you’re like, ‘Hey, wait, so what’s going on?’ And then your best friend goes, ‘Okay, hang on, hang on. This shit is crazy. Listen to this.’”
Space travel and rocket launches are not the kinds of things that you want to half-ass. It’s pretty important you get the science right and that includes a whole lot of preparation. Years of it. That poses an interesting challenge for telling the story of space, especially with ever-diminishing attention spans. As Larry Pipitone, Partner at GrandArmy, puts it, “The space news cycle just moves so slowly. It takes such a long time for a project to be completed. If you hold up a space story next to any other story in culture, it just takes way too long. It can feel like there’s no payoff along the way.”
As consumers and audiences, we want an immediate fix, or we want something that brings immediacy to our lives. That may explain why people don’t sit and watch these launches with the same eagerness that they tune into the WWDC Keynote from Apple. The good news is that within those years of preparation, there’s plenty of human drama, astounding accomplishments, and fascinating stories to be mined. They payoff is there. It just hasn’t been consistently approached from a rewarding angle before Supercluster.
Keep Space Weird
The weekly space news cycle tends to take the form of JPL or NASA press releases, or science writers’ examinations of academic journals and the newest developments. But Supercluster gravitates toward the untold stories that are maybe a little too weird to get the coverage from other places. Here, Eric Collins breaks down three stories that summarize the Supercluster approach.
“We did a write-up early on about the space funeral industry, which was really successful. The author contacted a number of families who signed up to have their loved ones’ ashes sent to space. It was about this new industry involving space, but it was really grounded in the experience of these regular people who had lost their father or their cousin and there they were, watching a rocket launch for that reason. It's not tech-driven, so it might get lost in the shuffle of most media companies.
We did another piece about these mad-scientist types who travel around the world tracking spy satellites for fun that governments send to space. All these spy missions are classified, but you can't hide a rocket launch that you can see with your eyeballs. And so these scientists who have a deep understanding of orbital mechanics track all these highly-classified government spy satellites, and then they just dump all the information on the internet for fun. And it's just a hobby for the weekend. There are so many ways that you can grab people’s attention. This article, for example, blew up with the privacy community; conspiratorial-minded people loved it because it was almost like citizen activism.
We did another article about how Michael Bay movies from the 90s, like Deep Impact and Armageddon, actually led to a department within NASA called Space Guard. We interviewed the chief of Space Guard and he laid out in direct quotes that ‘Yeah, all those movies, they actually had a huge, positive impact on the culture because people started to worry about asteroids and suddenly we got funding; now we're tracking asteroids.’ What a funny angle: Michael Bay might actually save the earth? I don't think most space, tech, or science blogs would be interested in covering stories like these, but they're perfect for us. And then when we see them resonate, it feeds itself because it's validating: there is an audience for this kind of storytelling.”
Supercluster doesn’t need to wait for these stories to happen either. Because of the standard approach to talking about space, there’s now a whole history of missed storytelling opportunities dating back to the start of space programs, if not prior.
The Supercluster team is currently at work on a bunch of features. They’re building applications and utilities to try to surface all of the depths of information about space in new ways. The supercluster app for iPhone and Android is the best way to follow every rocket launch happening all over the world. They’re also adding a Space Station Tracker and the Internet Astronaut Database, which is “the most comprehensive, complete record of every living thing to fly to space.”
The team’s approach to locating contributing voices isn’t a science. But that’s sort of the point. They proactively seek out contributors as passionate about space as they are. Sometimes they stumble across them. Collins shares a moment when he was on Reddit looking at an article about panspermia. “This commenter said something really kind of funny and insightful, and we just cold-reached out to them. And we were like, ‘You know, your comment history is really funny. Are you an author or a science communicator?’ And it turned out this person is a PhD student who always wanted to write but has never done that. They were basically just a prolific science commentator. And so we said, ‘why don't you write for Supercluster?’ We do work with many established science and space journalists, but we're also trying to find new voices.”
Supercluster isn’t just focused on new ways of storytelling. Inherently, given GrandArmy’s specialization in branding, design, and advertising, they want to update the visuals of space too. This ongoing project is a creative outlet for a lot of the team to experiment. The presentation of the information is just as important as the stories they choose to tell. “We're always talking about how all science and tech illustration looks like the inside of Iron Man's helmet. It doesn't have to be that way.”
The team started Supercluster with a fervent passion for the subject of space, and all the awe, adventure, and wonder that’s part of its orbit. “We see it as a higher calling,” says Pipitone. “We are looking for creative people who similarly believe in the mission of democratizing space.”
