Click on the aerial view of a cityscape on Google Earth or Microsoft's Live Local, and most of us don't discern much more than a cluttered expanse of buildings and car-lined streets.

But where others see a sprawl of empty rooftops, Colin Fitz-Gerald sees a cornucopia of unused advertising space.

Fitz-Gerald, who runs a roofing business in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, wants to make a business out of posting promotional messages on top of buildings. He's started a company, RoofShout.com, and is looking for roof owners and advertisers to bring his vision to fruition.

"I'm currently launching RoofShout.com with no money, no real experience running a business on the internet, and no real solid business plan," Fitz-Gerald said. "But I figure there's a lot of blank roofs and a lot of advertising that could go on the roofs."

So far, the venture has attracted more interest than Fitz-Gerald anticipated. An eBay listing he posted to auction a virtual rooftop ad on his company's homepage garnered hundreds of pageviews, though only three bids. The high bid was $105.

Fitz-Gerald isn't sure how much it will cost to put an ad on a real roof, or exactly how the process will work. He's considering using housewrap, a weather barrier material, as a base and painting ads on top of it. He's also working on a technique to ensure the advertising messages are printed in letters that are clear and large enough to be picked up by aerial mapping sites.

RoofShout isn't the only firm attempting to capitalize on the same virgin ad space. RoofAds, a division of Saber Roofing in Woodside, California, runs a service for posting ads on rooftops that are close to airports and highly visible to airplane passengers. The company is currently marketing to other areas as well.

"We realized with Google Earth and this satellite imagery that it doesn't have to be near airports. It can be anywhere," said Jay Saber, who owns Saber Roofing. Saber said he can install ads visible from 10,000 feet overhead.

Saber is also working on ads that glow in the dark. He's talking with organizers of the annual Burning Man festival about creating a 1,000-yard-long image of a burning man visible from high in the sky.




Publicado originalmente en www.wired.com