Drone advertising comes to IndieGoGo with Advatar
The Advatar Octocopter, a Drone advertising solution from Hoovy, has launched on IndieGoGo this morning
The Advatar Octocopter drone advertising project went live on IndieGoGo this morning. As of this writing, just one hour after launch, it has already raised more than $11,000, 20% of it’s $50,000 target.
What is drone advertising? Here is a brief video from Hoovy CEO Eugene Stark.
The crowd funding page notes:
“The Advatar is a wind resistant, GPS equipped octocopter that can fly banners in any location. We have spent countless hours perfecting the drone. The eight-engine Advatar allows us to carry the largest banners possible and stay in the sky longer so you can get the most out of your flying experience. The advertising banner can be seen up to 1,000 feet away and it always keeps the audience engaged. Our Advatar is equipped with the latest technologies and is designed specifically for the job to make advertising fun and engaging.
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“
We had the opportunity to ask the Hoovy team about their drone advertising solution prior to this launch, here are their responses.
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.
