It’s a bird…It’s a plane…It’s an ad.

Last June, the NBA appeared in the New York City skyline to hype up its draft. In November, Candy Crush put on a light show over the Hudson to commemorate its 10-year anniversary. That same month, Paris Hilton celebrated her wedding anniversary and the debut of her company, 11:11 Media, by lighting up the sky above the Santa Monica Pier.

Thank drones for bringing those brands to the sky—or, more specifically, Pixis Drones, an agency that creates what it describes as “branded aerial art displays.”

Zoom out: Despite some big-name clients, drone advertising is still in its “infancy,” Pixis General Manager Jeff Kaplan told Marketing Brew, so Pixis is still working to educate marketers on what’s possible before they give it a try. Plus, there are other hurdles to clear before liftoff, including creative and technical planning, FAA approvals, and the court of public opinion.

• Still, Kaplan and Pixis founder Brad Nierenberg are betting the strategy will take off.
• “We have an opportunity to…tell a story in a medium that has not been yet defined,” Nierenberg told Marketing Brew. “There’s a huge ceiling for this, and it can only go higher and brighter.”

Much to think about

When Pixis puts on a drone show, it typically results in a “flurry of inbounds” from people inquiring about costs and asking about doing shows of their own, including for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and corporate events, Nierenberg told us. Shows typically run for about 10 minutes.

• Pixis charges between $300 and $500 per drone per show, according to Nierenberg, depending on different factors.
• Most installations use between 250 and 500 drones, Kaplan said. That adds up to somewhere between $75,000 and $250,000, not including additional costs like site fees and content capture packages, Kaplan said.

For most weddings and bar mitzvahs, that might be a little much (though maybe not for the more extravagant ones…), but some are willing to pay up.

Keep reading here.—AM

Buying media on old-fashioned TV can sometimes be, well, old-fashioned.

Say you’re an automaker looking to reach viewers who are thinking about buying a new car. TV networks and media buyers have their best guesses as to where those audiences will be watching in the highest quantities and might bet, for example, that those viewers can be reached in primetime for the duration of a campaign.

But if in-market potential car buyers are spending more time watching late-night TV as the campaign progresses, it’s not necessarily easy to simply move those ad buys from primetime to The Tonight Show. In fact, sometimes it can take a lot of manual rejiggering to get an ad buy back on track.

• “Imagine a digital ad server where every time I wanted to move an ad, I had to call an agency and ask for permission. That’s kind of like television,” Ryan McConville, NBCUniversal’s EVP, ad platforms and operations, said. “We’ve been doing it this way for a long time, and it’s not working well.”

Some networks would like it to work better: This month, NBCUniversal unveiled In-Flight Linear Optimization, a tool for marketers that will enable them to shift their linear ad buys midway through campaigns to help prioritize reaching the audiences they’re targeting. The tool, codeveloped with Amazon Web Services, will use daily forecast data from companies like VideoAmp and iSpot in an effort to make linear ad dollars more efficient, McConville told Marketing Brew.

“The technology allows for a radical rethinking of TV,” he said.

Read the full story here.—KS

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Broken telephone: Ways that marketers can address the “growing disconnect between brand promise and customer experience.”

Take pause: A look at what slower podcast growth could mean for marketers.

Looking ahead: Why social media marketers might want to pay attention to these 10 trends this year.

Level up: Turns out 65% of customers are frustrated with inconsistent online experiences. The antidote? Cohesive content experiences. Bynder drives growth and delivers content consistency with a digital asset management platform. Learn more in their newest guide.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Forrester put together a guide on navigating the continuing economic downturn for CMOs and other B2C marketing leaders. Here’s your guide to that guide.

Risky business: Forrester data from last year indicated that a majority of US B2C marketing execs (69%) were planning on taking bigger risks in their marketing this year than last, but economic conditions might have some of them going back to playing it safe.

Repeat business: For marketers looking to contribute to their brand’s growth despite this uncertainty, Forrester recommended developing a strong understanding of the customer experience as a way to hopefully encourage loyalty.

• One in four B2C marketing execs didn’t have a good grasp of the “friction points” of their customers.
• Almost half (46%) thought the cost to improve that experience would outweigh the benefits.
• “If your consumers’ repeat business matters to you this year (and it should), leveling up your customer experience must take precedence,” according to the report.

Bye, jargon: Forrester also recommended that marketers start “ditching the marketing speak” as a way to more closely ally with CFOs, thus potentially better preserving their ad budgets even during tough economic times.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• To support diversity on TV, media orgs are looking to develop more metrics
• Streamer ads performed well during the Super Bowl, research says
• Black influencers are still facing pay inequity