Just what we need. More ads.
Drone advertising, or drone-vertising, is still in its early stages, but it’s a new avenue more companies are exploring. Just ask DroneCast.
Hoovy, another drone-based advertising firm, is taking things a step further by building its own drone, the Advatar Octocopter, designed specifically for advertising.
Hoovy launched a campaign on Indiegogo on June 2 and, as of press time, had already raised $11,735 of its $50,000 goal (23%). The Advatar is a wind-resistant, GPS-equipped octocopter that can fly a 3 foot by 12 foot banner for 15 minutes that can be seen from 1,000 feet away.
Some of the safety tests completed, passed and submitted to FAA include:
Drag Force of banner supported by multirotor
Sufficiency of maximum thrust to the multirotor
A website called The Best Drone Info spoke to Hoovy CEO Eugene Stark about the new project. Here’s the interview below:
Q. This looks like an interesting idea, how did you come up with this?
I came up with an idea while I was working at SpaceX. I was working on a robotics project that required me to learn about the industry and that’s when I realized how much innovation has been happening in this space. I saw many new uses of the drone technology being developed, but I didn’t see it being applied in the advertising space. I came up with an idea of attaching a banner to a drone and using that as an advertising platform. Fast forward a couple of months and Hoovy was born.
Q. Why did you decide creating the Advatar, vs. using an existing drone platform, made sense?
When I first started Hoovy, I purchased many existing drones to test them for advertising purposes. However, I quickly realized that all the drones on the market are designed to fly a camera, not the banner. Most of the drones on the market are not powerful enough to fly our banner and the ones that can lift it cannot stay in the air for long enough. I realized that the only way we’d be able to do drone advertising is to design a drone specifically for advertising purposes and that’s when we designed the Advatar.
Q. Are there any changes to existing drone regulations that you are hoping to see the FAA make to enable your drone advertising business to soar even higher?
FAA currently groups all drones under 55 pounds in one category. We hope that FAA would consider creating sub-category for drones under 8 pounds and allow more freedom to fly these drones. The limit of 8 pounds matches the weight of an object that must fired into an engine of an airplane as part of it certificate testing. The 8 pound drone is safe enough to where it would not cause significant damage in case something goes wrong.
