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New tricks in sky writing

Innovation

A newly formed South Australian company is targeting the eastern states with an advertising option which creates a “billboard’’ in the sky that can be seen for up to 25 kilometres with letters up to 450m tall.

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The brain child of James Hubbard and Peter Stark, SKYTXT – a 4.0 version of traditional skywriting – was launched in Adelaide in April.

State of the art computer programming combines with specially designed light aircraft which puff out vapour “dots’’ forming letters and messages.

It requires five airplanes flying side by side at 14,000 feet but in three minutes they can create an advertising message that can be read over a distance of more than 25km.

“In April we put up our web address in the sky above Adelaide to see what the reaction would be,’’ Mr Hubbard said.

“We were very pleased as we received a number of inquiries from advertising agencies on the same day asking us what is was and how it worked.

“We also ended up with thousands of hits on our website.

“The letters or numbers can be 300-450m tall and almost eight to nine kilometres long. That’s a pretty big advertising sign.

“We envisage this being extremely attractive is larger cities such as Melbourne and Sydney where, depending on the time of day, two million people could look up and read the sign.

“Also from Adelaide it only takes a couple of hours to fly to Melbourne or about four hours to get to Sydney.’’

He said the specially designed the aircraft operate at a very high altitude where there is very little wind enabling the message to last for up to 15 minutes.

“When you think of the cost to take out a full page advert in a major newspaper – around $20,000 – if provides a very cost effective advertising option.

“The immediacy is also another draw card as a potential clients can have a very quick turnaround from booking their advertising to seeing it written in the sky and reaching their audience.’’

This is a Creative Commons story from The Lead South Australia, a news service providing stories about innovation in South Australia. Please feel free to use the story in any form of media. The story sources are linked in with the copy and all contacts are willing to talk further about the story. Copied to Clipboard

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