You Can Watch Blue Origin's Space Launch Live on a Billboard in Times Square

When Jeff Bezos rockets into space with Blue Origin's first human flight Tuesday, spectators will be able to watch the historic event on towering billboards in New York, Las Vegas and Toronto. Branded Cities, a Phoenix-based company that owns some of the most coveted big-city billboard space in North America, says it struck an agreement with Blue Origin to livestream the entire launch. If you happen to be nearby, you can watch from the massive digital billboards known as "spectaculars" on the Thomson Reuters building in New York's Times Square, Harmon Corner in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip and Toronto's popular Yonge-Dundas commercial district (at Eaton Centre, 10 Dundas East and Atrium). After a pandemic year in which so many people shut themselves inside, you might call it one giant leap for out-of-home advertising—and a literal sign of outdoor activations coming back in a big way. If all goes according to plan, this will mark the second live space broadcast and first space launch to grace the skyscrapers' screens, said Steve Ellman, CEO and founder of Branded Cities, which names Adweek's parent company, Shamrock Capital, as an investor. The first was when Nasdaq broadcasted a live interview from the International Space Station on its iconic curved spectacular in Times Square. How the high-speed idea came together This month is an extraordinary one for private space travel, with business moguls Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson launching their respective companies into space within a week of each other. Branson and Virgin Galactic made it off the ground July 11, and on July 14, an idea struck Ellman. "I basically said, 'We could livestream this from space.'" He and Branded Cities COO and U.S. president Vaibhav Gupta reached out to a partner of Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos' brother, who will be joining him and two other passengers on the flight. By the afternoon of July 15, Mark Bezos responded to say he was interested. And within a few hours, they were off to the races. The activation came together in five days, from idea to launch. That took a team of nine Branded Cities employees working around the clock through the weekend. Come launch time, they'll watch from a command center showing spectacular feeds in all three cities. And they're ready with backup feeds in case something doesn't go according to plan, including weather delays. "No one has livestreamed from outer space [like this] onto digital [billboards]," Ellman said. "We’re supporting the Bezos family and space exploration. It's really just a great day for mankind. "But we're also doing it because we livestream a lot, and we want all of the national brands to understand this. We've livestreamed fashion shows from Paris. We did a digital runway where models were walking board to board. … But this is so unique we're hoping it opens the eyes of marketers to what they can do. If we can livestream from outer space, trust me, we can livestream from Paris." Advertisers often work up to the minute, and billboards get a bad rap for being static. But, Gupta said, "what this also shows is the power of digital OOH and how quickly we can react." A return to OOH For a snapshot of how Covid-19 affected OOH ad impressions, just talk to the Times Square Alliance. The group measures footfall in the tourist spot and saw daily pedestrian counts drop to 30,000 in March 2020 compared to 365,000 pre-pandemic. But TJ Witham, vp of communications, said that number climbed to 100,000 this March and is getting close to or breaking 200,000 many days now. Branded Cities is seeing that trend reflected in a return to ad spend in New York and even more so in Las Vegas. Toronto is coming back on more slowly due to Canada's strict lockdowns, Ellman said. "OOH is going to be a major benefactor of the lift out of Covid," he predicted. "We've all been restricted on travel and access for the last 15 months. People want to be outside. … A lot of ad budget money is going out of home because that’s where people are going." Gupta put it this way: "Advertisers have been advertising one-to-one. Now they can go back to advertising one-to-many." What to expect if you watch Branded Cities will livestream Blue Origin's feed directly, which will likely appear on the big screens around 8:30 a.m. ET, with the launch time set for 9 a.m. ET. Technical difficulties are possible—Branson's feed cut out during launch—but if all goes smoothly, people will get an external camera view of the astronauts boarding the spacecraft, the launch, flight, reentry and landing. The flight is scheduled to last all of 10 minutes and reach the Kármán Line, commonly seen as the beginning of space. In Times Square, viewers would see the launch on a collection of six digital screens, including a 170-foot-tall spire, totaling 6,450 square feet. The display in Vegas' Harmon Corner maxes out at 18,360 square feet. Blue Origin will stream the event on its website for those watching on a smaller screen.