Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a … baby?

That’s the typical reaction of Boston Red Sox fans to a 5,000-square-foot sky banner that often flies over Fenway Park. It shows a baby’s tiny bum crack, à la the old Coppertone ads, with the message “Getting a bum deal on life insurance? Call 888-GET-SBLI.”

“Every time I use that sky banner, I get tons of calls from people who tell me they love it,” says William Gaffney, senior vice president of corporate development for Woburn, Mass.–based SBLI (Savings Bank Life Insurance). “Insurance companies are usually considered uptight and buttoned down. We like to push the envelope and show we’re real people.”

Apparently, a lot of envelopes are being pushed. Though no industry-wide figures exist, aerial advertising is one of today’s emerging consumer marketing trends. Michael Arnold, head of Arnold Aerial Advertising in New York, estimates that 80 percent of his clients are now large corporations, up from 50 percent just a few years ago.

Although it’s still common to see an aerial ad like “Eat at Bob’s Crab Shack,” companies of all sizes are now looking skyward in an effort to grab consumers’ undivided attention in a media-saturated world. “It’s the last uncluttered medium,” notes Martin Allen, founder of AvPro Outdoor Inc., an aerial advertising firm in Haverhill, Mass. He says his advertisers, which include Jeep Cherokee and McDonold’s, find that sky banners add a “wow factor” to new-product introductions, particularly at large outdoor events and during rush hour.

Aerial ads can be as large as 50 feet high by 100 feet long. A company’s message and logo are either hand-painted or, for an extra level of realism, computer generated, such as when Broadway producers put actor Hugh Jackman’s face on a sky banner to promote the play The Boy from Oz. In general, though, the mantra of aerial advertisers is “Less is more.” Stewart explains, “Five thousand square feet of space might seem like a lot, but remember, you’ll only have people’s attention for three to 10 seconds. This isn’t a magazine ad that people are going to read and study.”

Arnold charges $3.50 a square foot to produce a hand-painted banner and $3.95 a square foot for one that’s computer generated. The fee for flying the banners ranges from $500 to $650 an hour. What’s the payoff? Aerial advertising companies often point to a 2003 survey conducted by the state of Maine after it spent $100,000 (about 6 percent of its marketing budget) to promote its new lottery. A whopping 18.3 percent of respondents said they learned about the lottery not from the myriad TV spots, radio ads, or billboards, but from the sky banners.

Still, aerial advertisers concede that it’s nearly impossible to gauge the impact of most campaigns, even those that include an 800 number and a Web address on the banner. “I look at it as pure branding,” SBLI’s Gaffney says. “We don’t measure. I just know that people really enjoy seeing an aerial banner, as long as it doesn’t buzz the field 50 times during a game.”

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