TJ Walker reacts to Heli d's plan to fly 400-square-foot LED billboards in helicopters, including one proposed for the 2026 Super Bowl. The FAA allows ads within 250 feet of viewers. Walker respects the creativity but worries about turning the sky into commercial space and what that means for attention, safety, and democracy.
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When the sky turns into a political billboard. According to San Francisco Gate SF Gate, California's next big political battlefield may not be television, social media, or even your mailbox. It may be up there in the sky. A company called Heli d plans to bring 400 square foot helicopter suspended and led billboards to the 2026 Super bowl at Levi's stadium in Santa Clara and then across the state. It's a beautiful stadium. I've stayed across right across the street several times in the last couple of years. Beautiful stadium out there in California. The Federal Aviation Administration is allowing these flying screens to come within about 250ft of viewers, making ads, in their words, unignorable. Co founder Simon Powell says airspace is becoming the next battleground audience attention. And he's openly eyeing campaigns calling the sky quote a new visual frontier for brands and candidates alike. We've already let our phones, our sidewalks, and our stadiums be colonized by ads. Now the remaining common space over our heads is up for sale, including for political messaging. When democracy depends on thoughtful voters, do we really want our space turned into the world's brightest attack ad platform? I don't know about that. Okay, so what's the real message here? Marketers are constantly doing everything they can to reach your eyeballs, to reach your ears, and ultimately reach your brain. Now we're going to have billboards in the sky. It might be the greatest thing ever for marketers, and it might be the worst things ever for your consciousness and your psyche because you can never get away of more bombarding ads. Let's dig a little deeper here. At some level, I do have a respect for the people who are putting this together. They're showing creativity. Because with any sort of advertising, consumers become blind to it. There is what's called message blindness. If you go by the same billboard every day for 10 years, you really don't notice it, but you can always notice something new. It's novel. Great advertising is always trying to come up with something different, unique. It could be the message, it could be the humor, it could be graphics. It could be the sound effect, it could be the medium. As we talked about just last week, there's a new sort of billboard in the subway system in New York City that has smell as what attracts people, not necessarily the visual image. For, I believe it was for Body Works or one of the, you know, one of the mall stores that sells soaps and perfumes. So there's always going to be some innovation. Just when you think, I've seen it all, there's Nothing new under the sun. Well, wrong. Humans are ingenious. There's always something new. Now, I could easily imagine, and I hate to say it, but it could be someone like a Mark Zuckerberg saying, hey, buy my. Reminds me I have my wrong glasses on today. Someone like Mark Zuckerberg could sell you his meta glasses and say, hey, we're going to put software on it so that it deletes any advertisements from the sky. So there may essentially be ad blockers. You can already get an ad blocker for your web browser, for your cell phone. I could easily imagine there being an ad blocker for sky billboards. We'll see. I hope I didn't just give an idea for Mark Zuckerberg to extract even billions of dollars more money from you and me. Okay, let's look at some more facts here. The Federal Aviation Administration has rules saying the flying ads can be as close as 250ft of viewers. Now, I don't know how much they weigh, but imagine where two of these. These ads are flying together, hit each other, and fall on a stadium full of people. I hope it doesn't happen, but that might put an end to this very quickly. Now, a Smirnoff ad, the vodka company in Miami already tested the 90 minutes of flight time. California is pitched as the next ideal step for flying billboards. So California, an innovator, and a lot of things media and pop culture related is sort of bringing this out and making it a big deal. Look, we're all past the stage where we can say, all advertising is bad. Let's get rid of all ads. And I would be a hypocrite if I did that. I run ads on my show. I run video ads. I run audio ads. For those of you listening to this show on Spotify or Amazon Music or YouTube Music or iTunes, and those of you who read my newsletter, see text ads. So I can't be a hypocrite here. We do live in a culture, a capitalistic culture, and I'm a capitalist. That does require the free flow of information for products and services through advertising. But is it going to permeate every inch of our consciousness? Are we going to have to essentially pay now to go to some park where they have blocked they've bought the air rights to their space to prevent airplanes? Are we going to have a situation where the Grand Canyon park loses its federal funding and the people who manage the Grand Canyon are going to have to sell off the air rights to Smirnoff Vodka so that when you're down in the Grand Canyon, you're bombarded with billboards to help pay for the people running the park service. I hope we don't get to that. I really do hope we don't get to that. But it is a challenging environment and I think is contributing to so many ills of society, whether it's obesity because we're all bombarded with a thousand ads a day or more to eat junk food and to drink sugary drinks. It's why we have so much debt in the country. We're all bombarded with great deals and ad buy this with one click, buy that with one click. The average person, according to many estimates, already sees at least 10,000 ads marketing message branding icons per day. So the genie is kind of out of the bottle, but I would like to be able to go for a walk, look up in the sky and enjoy the clouds, the sunset, the sunrise and not be bombarded with that.
