It was a beautiful day. Not a flogo in the sky.

People have been shooting special effects off in the sky since the Chinese decided that gunpowder had a secondary, peaceful use and ignited the first fireworks display 1000+ years ago.

I’ve always loved fireworks. And skywriting, which you don’t seem to see much anymore - or maybe I just don’t notice - but which was somewhat common at events when I was a kid. Of course, the skywriting could dissipate pretty fast on a breezy day, so if you weren’t giving it sharp notice, you might look up and say, "Well, it’s either ‘Drink Pepsi’ or ‘Drown Peeps’." Better, in terms of staying power, were the little planes dragging the banner ads behind them. Of course, you had to be pretty close to see what the ads said, given the limited size of the banners.

And now we have Flogos - corporate logos that take to the skies like giant soap bubbles (which is pretty much what they are, goosed with a bit of helium), making those skies friendly for a new form of advertising.

First off, I have to say that they are really, really cool. I couldn’t grab a good picture, but if you check their site out, you can see for yourself.

This breakthrough is the brain child of a special effects artist, Francisco Guerra, who also invented the wonderful fake snow that turns Hollywood backlots into the Swiss Alps as needed.

According to the AP article that I saw, Flogos (which are - as their FAQ’s make clear - environmentally healthy) were not developed in Hollywood, but in the back reaches of Alabama, "partly because there aren’t many people around to ask questions about the foam shapes that float above the building on test days."

Disney World, no surprise here, will be one of the first corporations to put it to use, when they blow some MIckey Mouse ears over the Magic Kingdom next month.

The cost of renting a Flogo machine compares favorably to skywriting and banner-dragging - they’re all in the $3.5- $5K range for a day, with Flogo on the lower end (although you may want to rent more than one machine at a time). And Flogo certainly has more of a cachet to it at this point. (If you’re thinking about renting a blimp, however, you’re talking big bucks: $250K/month and a six-month minimum commitment. There goes my idea of hiring an Opinionated Marketers blimp. Oh, well, we don’t have a logo anyway.)

While the idea of flogos is fun and cool, I’m not so enamored of the idea of one more means of putting advertising in front of us. Don’t we have enough already?

When I’m at a Red Sox game, trying to follow a high, fly ball, do I really need to see a logo for Jordan’s Furniture?

When I’m driving down Route 1, do I really need to get distracted by one of the kazilion car dealers on "Auto Mile."

When I’m out for a nice walk, and just want to look up in the bright, blue sky, and look at all those nice puffy cirrus clouds, do I really need to be assaulted by someone’s corporate logo?

It’s been coming on for a while, but I guess it’s just a matter of time before advertising is everywhere - like the Waste Management Garden that John wrote about the other day in his post on naming rights to public spaces. Parks. Highways. Toll booths. It’s certainly not unfathomable that public schools will one day bear, not the name of The Only Famous Person To Come From Your Town - or even the name of the retired superintendent - but the name of the local underwriter. ("My child is an honor student at P.S. Wachovia Bank.")

Then there’s that insidious idea of whispered messages directed to you in the grocery aisle. ("Buy me, buy me, you know you really want that bag of Tootsie Pops.")

Where does it end? I pour some milk onto my cereal and see a Kellogg’s logo forming atop my Kashi GoLean? I run bathwater and out pops a message that "Your water is brought to you by Procter and Gamble"? I bite into an apple, and the worm I find is FedEx orange and purple?

Grrrrrr…..

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