Yes, we wrote about some of the marketing around the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon last month, but this is an altogether different activation in Australia that is worthy of its own focus.

The recent solar eclipse was really only visible to people in a tiny part of Australia, Timor-Leste and West Papua. The prime location in Australia to see it was Ningaloo Marine Park (Nyinggulu) in Exmouth, a UNESCO World Heritage site. So Pink Floyd ran a competition for eight fans to win a trip to McLeods Beach, near the park, for a playback of the classic album as the eclipse was happening.

It was timed so the optimum moment of the eclipse arrived just as the closing lines, from the appositely titled ‘Eclipse’, played (“But the sun is eclipsed by the moon…”).

The competition winners (titled the Astronomy Domine 8, a knowing reference to a track on Pink Floyd’s debut album) were taken to the beach where a black pyramid, around 15 feet in height, had been built on the sand. The pyramid’s design had been overseen by Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis, the design company who created all the Dark Side Of The Moon artwork on its original release.

“The eight winners were brought together from all walks of life and represent multiple generations of Pink Floyd fans – a testament to the band’s cross-generational appeal,” noted the press release on the event.

This is very much in keeping with the wonderfully overblown things the band did in the 1970s, such as playing in the ancient Roman amphitheatre in Pompeii in 1972 or flying a giant inflatable pig over Battersea Power Station in London in 1977 to shoot the cover of their Animals album.

Given solar eclipses only happen on average twice a year and that this one was very close to the actual album anniversary, it was a marketing open goal thematically: one of those things that fall into a marketer’s lap and defies them to not do something around it.