One giant step for advertising

Did you ever try to see shapes in clouds but lacked the imagination? Well the days of peering into the skies and seeing nothing but an amorphous mass of droplets (or ice crystals) are over A US company aims to has invented a way of making "clouds" in more or less any shape you chose. However, the “clouds” that people will actually see are more likely to be advertising logos.

Called flogos the clouds are a mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases. The company uses re-purposed artificial snow machines to generate floating adverts at a rate of four two foot by one foot flogos per minute. They will last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on conditions in the atmosphere, and generally bob to heights of 300 to 500 feet (90 to 150 meters) though they can rise up to 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) in the air. The floating ads are not a danger to airplanes, because flying through one is like going through a cloud. Nothing from the Flogo will stick to the surface of a plane.

Advertisers have already decided to use flogos to target what they describe as difficult markets. Clive Felcher of leading Ad agency Halberd Begley said “ even in the UK there is a surprisingly large section of the population who, because they are ascetics who spend their days on poles a-la Simeon Stylites, do not watch or listen to commercial radio and television. They rarely read newspapers or use the internet either. I am sure that the flogo will go a long way to tap this market. Leon Capgras, creative director at Otis Lambda is not so sure that this approach will be so effective: “ targeting stylites, gurus and other pole sitters is a bold move to be sure, but ascetics do not really have much disposable income”

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