Marketing Blimps

Every other line in your marketing budget stops the day you stop paying. A blimp is $1,526 once and customers are still flying theirs fourteen years later.

The comparison worth making

A month of local radio, one billboard rotation, or a decent print run each cost more than $1,526 and then end. The blimp does not end.

After the purchase the only recurring cost is helium, at roughly $2.50 a day in top-offs. That is not a rounding trick. It is genuinely the whole running cost.

It is not a clever medium. It is an unusually durable one for the money, and that is the honest argument for it.

What it actually does

It buys height. A sign on your building is read by people who already found you. A blimp at 120 feet is read from a long way off by people who were going somewhere else.

That is the entire mechanism, and it means the medium only works in one specific situation: when there is real pass-by traffic that currently cannot see you. If nobody drives past your business, no balloon will fix that, and we would rather say so before you spend the money.

How fast it goes up

Production runs three to seven days from artwork approval, then two to five business days on UPS Ground from our North Carolina factory. Most campaigns are flying inside two weeks of a decision.

On site, the first inflation takes some reading. After that it is ten minutes and one person. That ten minutes is the thing to plan for, because if nobody owns the job the blimp stops going up by week three.

Who gets a return

• Car and truck dealers — The largest single group of buyers, and the most repeat purchases.
• Homebuilders — A California company flies 100+ of ours every weekend for builder communities.
• Grand openings — Scale on day one without a permanent sign budget.
• Seasonal and clearance events — Fly it for the promotion, box it, bring it back next quarter.
• Trade shows — One helium fill covers a three-day show, given 15 feet of ceiling.

More at advertisingblimps.com.