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Joke ad campaign for “Mooncheeze” stirs up trouble with NASA

A fake ad campaign for Mooncheeze didn't leave NASA laughing.

There's no shortage of advertising space on the moon.

That might have been what a British ad company thought when it picked a lunar canvas for its fake campaign to advertise Mooncheeze.

Mooncheeze is a fake brand, unfortunately, and the fictional campaign was for a holiday joke video Cherryduck Productions was making to entertain its clients.

The video features a documentary-style account of how the campaign was developed and brought to life.

"It wasn't a case of calling God up and asking if we could advertise on his moon. We just had to go for it," an employee in the video says.

But the spoof video was a case of calling NASA up, apparently, and it failed to tell the space agency that the project was fake, according to the Daily Mail.

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Cherryduck asked a scientist what it would need to project onto the moon and said it was planning a campaign to project a Mooncheeze logo. Before long, NASA staff was sending emails warning the company that there are laws about pointing lasers into space.

The decision to deceive NASA is a bit puzzling, but Cherryduck seems to take its pranks seriously. Employees told the Daily Mail they wanted to research the campaign as though it was real and thought NASA would deny them the information if they admitted to the hoax.

They got the information in the end and the final video is a giveaway, if NASA hadn't already caught on.

James Vellacott, co-founder of the company, describes in the video how the Mooncheeze project started.

"When the Mooncheeze entrepreneurs came to us it was clear they wanted to make some waves in the cheese arena," he says.

"There was only one place they could be advertising," says Kim Knight, head of production, followed by several people echoing "On the moon!

"It was big, it was ballsy, it was probably illegal. But it was going to get them noticed," creative director Jez Furlong adds.

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An engineer says the company bought a special projector that was powerful enough for the job. The projector used in the video was actually a box made from black foam board and a lamp, according to the Daily Mail.

One part of the video describes the technical requirements for projecting a logo all the way to the moon, which is likely the information they gathered from NASA. That's a lot of trouble for a few seconds of informed pranking.

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