Wait, That Cloud Looks Like A TV Commercial…

Culture

from the can't-go-anywhere dept

As advertisers continue to desperately look for new channels as they fear the end of the traditional television commercial, it appears one company is betting that they’ll want to move those commercials into the sky. They’ve built a huge, specially designed, TV screen that fits on the side of a blimp. From there, it can display video, rather than the more traditional scrolling text. They’ve apparently got one advertiser signed up to use the thing, paying $5 million for one year of the blimp in an undisclosed European location. Of course, about the only real advantage seems to be the novelty of a floating commercial — which could get tiresome really quickly. Some also (reasonably) wonder just how effective such advertising is. After noting that people will look, because it’s a blimp, a professor of retail management notes: “It’s a floating billboard… 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.” It’s true that you need to do something different these days to get people’s attention, since they have so many other options of what to look at. However, basing your advertising strategy on the novelty aspect of how the ad is delivered seems likely to only have a very short term branding impact, rather than any real long-term strategic benefit.