The Advertising In The Air.
Aerial advertising was born in the 1890s, before the Wright brothers. Box kites flew dragging advertising banners, likely the first flying ads.
In 1896, a new ad method dropped: pieces of paper were shot from a gun or cannon. Balloons, too, began around that time.
A 1902 balloon airship used to advertise Mellin’s Food. Mellin and Company, a baby food maker bought 25 airship flights over London. "Mellin’s Food" was printed on its side. It caught the imaginations of people in the streets.
Skywriting dates back to World War I, when a group of pilots in Britain’s Royal Air Force discovered that running paraffin oil through their planes’ exhaust created a white smoke trail that would hang in the air. They used the smoke to signal ground forces when all other means of communication were unavailable, and to create (literally) smoke screens for troops and ships.
After the war, a captain named Cyril Turner took what he knew about skywriting to the advertising world. In 1922, he struck a deal with a London newspaper, and on Derby Day took to the skies over Epsom Downs, where he wrote "Daily Mail" in large white letters.
A few months later, Turner hopped across the Atlantic, where he wrote "Hello USA" over New York City. The next day, to promote his new business, Turner went up again and scrawled the number of the hotel where he was staying, "Vanderbilt 7200." The hotel received 47000 calls in a span of two and a half hours.
Makers of America’s favorite brand, Lucky Strike, the company became the first major corporate sponsor of skywriting. It’s said that sales of Luckies jumped 60% immediately after a skywriting demo over Philadelphia.
In 1931 the Pepsi-Cola Company set forth to become the world’s foremost skywriting user.
At the time a distant contender in the cutthroat cola wars—a 1940 New Yorker cartoon depicts an antiaircraft gun crew in Coca-Cola shirts taking aim at a Pepsi skywriter -Pepsi hired skywriter Andy Stinis and his classic 1929 Travel Air D4D biplane to spread its message, and Stinis would limn DRINK PEPSI-COLA often eight times a day over various cities.
Pepsi eventually owned or contracted for a fleet of 14 skywriting airplanes - often Stearmans - to work all over the U.S., Mexico and Central America.
In 1940 alone, Pepsi scribbled some 2225 skywritten messages over 48 states, Mexico, Canada, Cuba, and South America.
Now, 100 years later, there are over 600 companies, which operate banner-towing and aerial advertising in America alone. Unlike Zeppelins and big flying boats, skywriting will be around forever. The sky is a canvas so enormous that there will always be a painter-pilot or two waiting to challenge it.
