Planet Fitness Sticks Up for Pluto in Open Letter to NASA

Planet Fitness is all about making you feel good about yourself, without all the hard-core B.S. of traditional gyms. That attitude is central to the brand's new ad campaign from Red Tettemer + Partners, based around the good old-fashioned pat on the back, or "POTB," a "gesture of respect and encouragement" that embodies the brand promise. The campaign includes a manifesto print ad, an online spot and a Facebook app called the POTB Generator, which lets you dole out pats-on-the-back for just about anything. Now, the agency is taking things into galactic territory with a humorous open letter to NASA, in which it gives Pluto, that onetime planet and current dwarf planet/loser, a much-needed POTB. The whole letter is quite funny, although the Red Tettemer writers get a +1 for getting the phrase "playing dodgeball with Uranus" in there. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is already on its way to Pluto; it left in 2006 and is expected to reach the distant hunk of ice and rock sometime in the summer of 2015. But Planet Fitness wants NASA to send another rocket, one that won't scientifically observe Pluto so much as emotionally empower it—a POTB "from one planet to another."