How do you raise awareness of an unknown Italian brand in the UK during a toxic news cycle and just before Christmas?

Launched in 2024, Star Bottle® is the world’s first service that allows anyone to send a real message into space - transforming words, memories, images and voices into signals that travel to the stars.

Thanks to its proprietary technology and a partnership with M3SAT and Telespazio, Star Bottle® uses a dedicated antenna (BTS1) at specific times of the year to transmit messages into space.

When Star Bottle® approached me, the brief was bold: send the English national anthem into space as a PR stunt.

As a former news reporter, my spidey senses started tingling - for the wrong reasons:

The Risk: The Epstein files were due to be released. Any Royal-adjacent story was about to be drowned out by negative press surrounding Andrew

The Brand: For a new-to-the-UK brand, the Royals can be divisive. We needed "Universal," not "Polarising."

The Pivot: From Majesty to The Bard.

We had four weeks only to generate some serious press attention before their scheduled transmission to the North Star on December 30. I knew we needed something quintessentially British, culturally untouchable and something that would drive talkability..

We decided to take the Globe galactic.

The Strategy:

We partnered with a historic Shakespeare theatre company in Derby

We recorded Julius Caesar’s famous "I am constant as the North Star" speech

We converted it into binary code and beamed it via a dedicated space antenna (Star Bottle®) directly toward the North Star

The transmission will travel for 430 years before it reaches The North Star - unbelievably, the exact same amount of time since the play was first performed at the Globe - making this act as long-lasting as the works of Shakespeare themselves.

Oh and the media loved it.

By pivoting away from a risky royal angle to a "Shakespeare in Space" story, we secured mass national coverage including segments across the BBC (TV and radio) and the Mail Online. A total potential reach of 1.5 BILLION and zero negative sentiment.

Whether the aliens give us a standing ovation or a request for an encore, one thing is certain: Star Bottle® is now officially on the UK map.

This project is a reminder that in PR the first idea isn't always the right idea. Success often lies in the pivot.

Lewis Lowery Communications