The excellent recall results associated with sky typing advertising may eventually help to justify its high initial costs compared to advertising with traditional sky writing. Right now, the ROI is unfavorable because the upfront expenditures for sky typing advertising are prohibitive for all but larger marketing budgets. Sky typing advertising is different than sky writing, a technology that is over 70 years old. Rather, sky typing advertising uses multiple fixed-wing aircraft to emit fog (pressurized titanium tetrachloride) to form sharp, individualized, highly recognizable letters, glyphs, symbols or graphics.

Traditional sky writing may take a single fixed-wing plane up to 30 minutes to finish a short message (about six to eight characters in length). The plane acrobatically scribes the cursive message in the air, like a fountain pen writes a word on parchment. Comparatively, sky typing involves a squadron of usually five planes flying in close formation, with each plane dispensing vapor in a series of dots that form a part of each letter, similar to the way dot-matrix printers form characters through multiple back-and-forth passes of the print head across the paper. One plane finishes what the plane ahead of it started, so all five planes are involved in creating each letter, graphic, etc.

Sky typing technology allows the marketer to specify longer messages than can be created with traditional sky writing, up 30 characters. Sky typing can also be used to create simple graphics. Because normally five planes are used to distribute the workload, the sky typed message can be finished in a fraction of the time required for traditional sky writing, often in just three to four minutes. It is also substantially more expensive, since it involves more planes - as much as $10,000 to $15,000, compared to the $5,000 paid for a sky writing message.

The advent of new, patented vapor delivery system promises to reduce the cost of sky typing significantly, as only one plane is needed to perform the operation. Both sky writing and sky typing employ electromechanical valves and nozzles to spray a pressurized fogging agent (commonly titanium tetrachloride) into the atmosphere, where it reacts with water vapor to form a white, durable titanium oxide—this is the message or design that consumers see. Improvements to the pressurizing system, valves, nozzles and other system components of the sky typing apparatus allow the new invention to emit vapor more efficiently and thereby only need one plane to perform the complete sky typing operation.

By Darrell Woody

Gazette Staff Writer