If you’re in the process of planning a broad-audience advertising campaign, have you considered the benefits of airplane banner advertising? Aerial advertising has been in existence since the early 1920s when planes first began to trail advertising banners. Decades later in 2001, approximately 600 companies were authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration to provide banner towing services.

There are two airplane message options: banners and skywriting. Airplane banners are towed, and usually contain five-foot-high lettering. The lengths and widths of these banners tend to vary.

Sky-written messages tend to average eight characters. These can be a combination of letters and numbers, each of which is about one mile tall.

While an airplane towing a banner will fly lower in the sky, a skywriting airplane will begin at about 10,000 feet. This is because the air is both calmer and cooler at that altitude. Since cooler air exerts more pressure, the smoke, thus the message, will be held together more effectively.

Depending on the weather conditions, especially when they’re ideal, a sky-written message can usually be seen for over 2,800 square miles. This is, of course, a much greater distance than a standard billboard. As such, it is a much more effective way to initially advertise a product, service, or upcoming event.

A recent survey showed that aerial advertising is memorable. It was found that 79% of the survey’s participants remembered the product or service being advertised. Furthermore, 67% remembered at least half of the message’s content.

When considering the benefits of an aerial advertising campaign, it is important to note that some have experienced a 20% response rate. The cost for traditional print advertising varies by publication, page size, and the frequency with which an ad is published. While a single beach-area aerial campaign will cost approximately $450 an hour, just imagine the potential response when the beach receives up to 1.5 million visitors on a single, sunny day.

Airplane message options also include a variety of aerial advertising packages. If you’re planning to extend your advertising campaign over several days, weeks or months, this may be something that you’re interested in. When you contact an aerial advertising company, they will be able to provide more detailed information on their hourly rates as well as their packaged rates.