It might not be an obvious choice for advertising, airplane advertising. We think of radio spots, newspaper advertisements, and – if our budget is large – billboards. We don’t often think of the plane advertising, but we should.
Airplane advertising has many advantages over more traditional advertising that makes it an ideal, if not obvious choice, for use of the advertising dollar. Let’s look at a few.
First, aerial advertising is relatively inexpensive compared to other forms of advertising. You can’t look just at the dollar spent, but the audience reached. That is, when you place a newspaper ad, you consider circulation. Well, you say, that newspaper has a circulation of 100,000, so that many people will see my advertisement.
Not so fast.
Unlike airplane advertising, not everyone who reads the paper will see your ad. That is, if the advertisement is placed in the local section of the paper, your advertisement will only be seen by those people who read that section (some might only read the front section and the sports page, while others might only read the classifieds).
Once people are reading “your” section, there’s no guarantee they will read the ad you want them to read. Many people don’t read the advertisements at all.
How is plane advertising different? It’s different in many ways. For example, you don’t ask potential customers to see your advertisement, you make sure they do. You don’t wonder if they read the airplane message; you know they do. You don’t even have to wonder if they remember the advertisement – studies show they do, when it’s sent to them via banner towing.
Airplane messages are the ideal form of advertising because advertisers don’t have to wonder if their ad was seen, they don’t have to worry that it wasn’t read and they certainly don’t have to wonder if it is remembered.
Aerial advertising has a nearly 100% “seen” rate, in that the majority of people will look to the sky when they are greeted with some plane advertising in the air. The majority of the people who see and read the advertisements will also remember them, so advertisers can be confident that their ads aren’t just seen, they are remembered.
Also unique is that advertisers don’t have to worry they are invading on their potential customer’s spaces. That is, there are no advertisements to place on car windows (which just get thrown away), no living rooms to invade through the television and no billboard to distract driving. While lying on the beach or enjoying a music festival, the potential customer only has to look to the sky to get the message.
Best of all, they remember the ad because it’s novel and creative. They don’t feel as if their lives have been invaded. Certainly, if they want to ignore the banner advertising, they can roll over on the beach, or not look up from the music festival activities, but since most people report a positive response to banner advertising, it’s safe to assume the majority of people won’t do that.
Why do banner advertising? Because it works. Your aerial advertising has a greater chance of reaching the intended audience more than any other form of advertising.