New In-The-Sky Advertising Hopes to Soar Above The Crowd To Get You A Message.

Sometimes when it comes to the world of advertising, everything old really is new again.

All it needs is a little twist.

Which brings us to a company known as The Lightship Group.

The Orlando, Florida based outfit has taken an ancient concept and combined it with new technology to create what company officials term TV in the sky.

Their gimmick: a blimp that floats 1,000 feet in the air, travels 24 kilometres an hour, and shows everything from commercials and movie trailers to music videos and sports highlights on its giant screens above a city – or anything that an advertiser wants.

You’ve probably seen them floating over NFL games in the past, but this ship is different, because of the range of media it’s capable of displaying and because it’s designed to reach to an entire area, not just an open air arena.

“It totally rises above the clutter because this is the only one of its kind in the world,” points out company exec. Toby Page. “It’s never been seen before, so it gets a huge amount of attention.

“It gives you now real-time flexibility to change what it says on the sign. Before it would take a matter of weeks, whereas now it’s a matter of seconds.”

The initial model allows for a red-coloured display only during daylight hours and full hues after dark. But future models will look like an HDTV set in the sky.

The firm won’t say who its first big client is, but if others jump on this blimp bandwagon, it’s clear it won’t take long to make back the initial investment – someone already paid $5 million to launch the first yearlong campaign next month.

Lightship claims it’s better than a billboard because it attracts so much attention.

But skeptics aren’t so sure.

“I’ve never heard anything like it, but it’s a billboard,” notes retail and marketing professor Richard Feinberg of Purdue University. “It’s a floating billboard, only instead of you passing the billboard at 96 km/h the billboard is passing you.

“It would be very hard for me to believe from any research that somebody looks at a blimp of any form and says ‘I’ve got to have that,’ unless it says ‘Free Dodge Vipers’ or something.”

The company operates only in the States for now – it took them months to work out permission to fly from the Federal Aviation Administration. They’d need a similar go-ahead from Canadian officials if they hope to invade our airspace.

But if the venture is as successful as its creators hope, don’t be surprised if advertisers here begin to promise you pie in the sky – even while you’re looking up into it.

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