What’s the best way to support England for the Euro’s? How about a 10 metre England flag and a 100ft Grenade hot air balloon! A great way to use Hot Air Balloon Advertising
Disturbing media and pushing the boundaries is something we are more than fond of. This time our client Grenade wanted to do something special for the Euro Semi-Final and Final. What was the best way of doing this they asked? We got a giant England flag made in just a few short days, got all the permissions and launch sites in place for two very exciting and not normally done flights. We chose to fly over two major cities these were Manchester and Liverpool, usually, it is very difficult to do this but with our good connections, communication with air traffic control and airports we ensured that this would happen.
The first for the Semi-Finals took place in Liverpool, we contacted the Merchant Taylors School as it was a perfect take-off location for the direction we wanted straight over the town. The school put up a post announcing the launch it quickly racked up over 300 likes, 700 comments of photos of the balloon that the public had seen whilst flying and over 1000 related posts, that is social media at its finest!
We even got into the Liverpool Echo, see the link below for the article.
Manchester Flight
The Finals flight took place in Manchester, this was a bit more challenging as the launch location was very close to the airport but with some great communication and planning from ourselves and air traffic control, we made this possible. Thanks to the team at Sale Rugby Football Club for allowing us to use one of their fields as a take off-site and evening having us back in the evening to watch the rest of the game!
Another great reaction from the public. We timed the flight perfectly ensuring that we launched and completed the flight prior to the match so all focuses would be on us and no one would miss the match. With each of these flights, social media takes over with hundreds of photos being shared on local Facebook pages.
The beauty of advertising with a hot air balloon is that photos can get recycled when the general public searches for the balloon. Each balloon has a unique registration that can be searched or if not most of the time they have a sponsorship banner that can be used to link to the balloon to. Especially with this being a Grenade the hot air balloon is very unique as it is one of a kind so every time the balloon gets operated a lot of other content from previous activations gets reviewed and shared further.
As a result of doing our Manchester flight, the hot air balloon got put into multiple newspapers such as Bury Times, Opera News and The World News. This is aside from the general social media aspect as well which was hundreds of photos and comments on new and old Grenade posts.
