Nodal Bits

I’ve mentioned before how my church, Fellowship Church, has leveraged their position directly in the landing path zone near DFW Airport to promote themselves through the use of a huge logo painted directly on their roof — a form of ‘Roofvertising‘, as it were. They’ve now done yet another type of “Skyvertising” by painting a huge chalk portrait of Jesus on the church parking lot:

While this is clearly more of a novelty and a PR ploy to remind people that this is Easter weekend (many people only attend church twice per year — Easter Weekend and Christmas services), roofvertising and skyvertising are actually serious forms of marketing that can often reach a great many people who are exposed to the promotions when they fly over them or see them when browsing through satellite imagery and aerial photos in Google Maps, Bing Maps, Mapquest, and other mapping applications. KFC’s “Space Ad” — an image of their iconic “Colonel” mascot/logo built at large scale out in the desert of Nevada — was probably the most famous example of this type of marketing.

Fellowship’s chalk portrait of Jesus certainly allowed them to abruptly stand out from the crowd of other churches all vying for attendees this weekend. Many churches do little more to promote themselves at Easter than to hang a large banner outside.

Thus far, the publicity stunt has only received news coverage in Texas, as far as I’m seeing, but I’m guessing it could be picked up at any moment by news organizations elsewhere as a human-interest piece appropriate for the weekend. Some of Fellowship’s other past lesson series and creative promotional ideas have achieved nationwide or even international news coverage on CNN and more.

In this instance, the publicity was surely extremely cost-effective, primarily obtained for the cost of the chalk since volunteer members provided the labor to assemble the chalk painting.

To see my blog post from years back about Fellowship Church’s rooftop logo, click here.

Postscript: Here’s a fun time-lapse video of the making of the portrait:

Tags: aerial photos, church marketing, Fellowship Church, publicity stunts, roofvertising, satellite images, satellite photos, skyvertising

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2014 at 11:58 am and is filed under Advertising, Bing Maps, General Commentary, Google Maps, Location Marketing, Maps & Mapping, Paintings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.