As workers assembled painted tiles into a gigantic image of Colonel Sanders last fall, they carefully covered their work with tarps. They knew that even in the middle of the desert near Area 51 in Nevada, somebody up there might be watching.
In fact, that eventually was the whole idea. As part of a rebranding effort, KFC Corp. worked with an event marketing company to have its 87,500-square-foot Colonel photographed from space by GeoEye’s IKONOS satellite as it passed over the site.
Originally developed to serve more serious business and government purposes, the satellite imagery industry is eager to broaden its reach into more whimsical uses. GeoEye spokesman Mark Brender calls “astro-tising” or “astrovertising” projects like KFCs “a creative way to use space-based technology.”
KFC used one-foot square tiles painted red, white, eggshell, beige and black to construct the new company logo, putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle near Area 51, the remote Air Force test center rumored to be a UFO rendezvous.
“It was a logistical challenge,” said KFC spokesman Rick Maynard. During the six days of on-site construction, workers covered up the tiles “so any flights that were going over wouldn’t be able to see what we were up to,” Maynard said – paranoia about Big Brother writ large, perhaps.
The company worried that cloudy weather might obscure the image once it was time to be photographed, but the weather cooperated. The new KFC image was unveiled in November as the company announced a campaign to “contemporize” its restaurants.
“KFC and (parent company) Yum! Brands have kind of a long, proud history with space- related promotions,” such as Pizza Hut’s logo on the side of a Russian rocket and Long John Silver’s offer of free giant shrimp if NASA found evidence of an ocean on Mars, Maynard said. “People love outer space.”
GeoEye charged KFC about $2,000 for the job, Brender said.
“We will look for the right opportunities and certainly be responsive to any company that calls and wants satellite imagery over their facilities or over their brand or their trademark, as long as we can see it from space,” he said.
As satellite imagery goes mainstream with applications such as Google Earth, companies like GeoEye and Longmont-based DigitalGlobe hope it becomes a more common tool.
Boulder-based Ball Aerospace, which built DigitalGlobe’s QuickBird satellite, dressed its own employees in white shirts and stood them on a blue background to form a “living logo” for the company’s 50th anniversary last year. The company has used the image taken by QuickBird in advertisements.
A British Airways commercial zooms into satellite images of cities the airline flies to. It also teamed with Google Earth so that travelers can research their trips online by virtually “flying” to their destinations.
The “Sopranos” website features a Google map with satellite imagery that allows viewers to zoom in to sites like Shea Stadium and the banks of the East River, where incidents in the fifth season of the TV show purportedly took place.
Satellite imagery also has been used in the films “Mission: Impossible III”; “I, Robot”; “X-Men: The Last Stand”; and “World Trade Center.”
Companies that place advertisements on roofs around airports are now considering expanding their territory “in the hopes that (their ads) might appear on a Google Earth type site,” said DigitalGlobe spokesman Chuck Herring. The risk of such a move is that it may be months or years before images on the site are updated.
Advertising is not one of DigitalGlobe’s core business lines, Herring said. But because the awareness of satellite imagery has gone up drastically over the last few years, “you’re starting to see people react to it.”
Staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi can be reached at 303-954-1488 or kyamanouchi@denverpost.com.
Ads from space
Satvertising (sat’ ver ti zing) n. – The use of large scale ground display advertisements for the purpose of targeting high altitude aircraft and satellite imagery.
The release of the new satellite overlay functionality of Google Maps has ignited tremendous interest in this form of imagery. While it’s true that we’ve had public satellite imagery available for some time, never was it as intuitive, speedy, and usable for curious browsing as Google Maps is.
Given this development, and the likely scenario that satellite imagery is only going to get more prevalent, it seems obvious that advertisers are going to try to capitalize on the situation. In fact, some already have.
Whether by careful painting of parking surfaces and roofs, or the use of planned roof coloring in complex arrangements of buildings, advertisers could embed their branding in the satellite imagery for a region.
Source: Dennis Forbes, yafla.com
