Pillows in Space: Taking SleepBetter.org to New Heights

This Sunday, I will be rolling out to the middle of the Black Rock desert (of Burning Man Festival fame) in Nevada to help send pillows 100,000 feet up into (near)space, and any of you can watch this unfold live on SleepBetter.org. It is all part of an out of this world promotional campaign we cooked up for Carpenter Co. and SleepBetter.org on behalf of our client SLAY Communications.

It all started this summer with a Facebook fan engagement program called Postcards from Pillow, where SleepBetter.org’s more than 325,000 Facebook fans had many chances to compete to become pillow parents to a pillow toy that we designed and had manufactured. Our pillow parents then spent the summer sending in pictures with their pillows, which they “adopted” and named. We received hundreds of photos and created a gallery of more than four-hundred photos (here), including one with Iron Chef Michael Symon.

To cap off the engagement program we partnered with JP Aerospace “America’s OTHER Space Program” to float the pillows into space. Carpenter Co. is the sponsor of a JP Aerospace PongSat mission this Sunday for the Pillow in Space live event. PongSats are science experiments packed into Ping-Pong balls sent in by students, schools and amateur scientists across the country and the world. SleepBetter.org will broadcast the launch, flight and landing of two of the launch vehicles beginning at 11:45am EST here http://sleepbetter.org/pillow-in-space/.

More than 2,000 PongSats will be going up on Sunday and hundreds of participants have registered for live watch parties, including two entire middle schools. The live broadcast will include mission control in Carpenter Co.’s New York City showroom where an “anchor” will banter with the field “reporter,” (aka me) who will sit with JP Aerospace president John Powell and discuss the live feed coming down from 10 cameras on the launch vehicles.

So tune in to SleepBetter.org at 11:45EST this Sunday to watch our client’s pillows soar into the blackness of space and while you are there find out more about how to sleep better.