By Wayne Adair
Guest Columnist

Here’s the scene: you’re on the freeway at 4:30 p.m. in the afternoon, right in the middle of an eight-lane parking lot. Around you are thousands of other motorists, all stuck on the same patch of asphalt. If you think like a commuter, this is the pits! Now put on your advertiser’s hat and look at this in a different way. Each person that is there with you is a consumer, and they are just sitting there looking for something to take their minds off of this rotten commute. So how can you reach them? You could go with traditional transit media, putting a billboard on a bus side and reaching five or ten cars on either side of the bus. But you want more. You want to reach every driver and passenger on the highway, north and south lanes. You want it to be big and you want it to grab the attention of everyone who sees it. How do you do that?

The answer is to put a flying billboard over the rush hour traffic. What’s a flying billboard? Good question! The billboard is simply a sheet of high-quality lightweight material that is rigged with a lead pole and bridle and is towed behind an aircraft. On this piece of material you can display text or graphics or any combination of the two. Billboards range in size from 20x50 (20 feet tall and 50 feet long) to 30x100. For those who really want to make a statement, signs as large as 50x120 have been pulled.

Let’s get back to our traffic jam; this time with a billboard that has your, or your client’s product logo on it. With your billboard floating over the rush-hour gridlock, your message is going to be exposed to 200,000 people each hour it flies. The math is easy—three hours over the daily commute will get you more than a half million pairs of eyes looking at your sign. The number is repeatable each and every day of the working week. Weekends can find your sign over community events, fairs, sporting events, and so on. Factor in that the sign is big, moving, and is in a conspicuous place, people will go out of their way to get a look at it.

Those of you that have spent time on the East Coast know that aerial advertising is a growing concern there. Aerial billboards are the norm on the city skylines from New York to Key West. When you are on the beaches of the Carolinas you expect to see planes towing aerial signs. Why? Because they work!

The question now is why aren’t aerial billboards the norm in the Northwest? There are a couple of answers to that question, but the most direct answer is the advertising community has not had a chance to take a serious look at this unique, effective form of advertising. So consider taking a closer look at adding an aerial component to your ad campaign. With aerial billboards, the sky is not the limit, it’s just the beginning.

Wayne Adair is a pilot and the owner/operator of AdsAloft in Sedro Woolley, Washington. Visit www.adsaloft.com