Drones are joining blimps, sign-toting planes, and skywriters in the work of spreading messages across the sky.

Drones are joining blimps, sign-toting planes, and skywriters in the work of spreading messages across the sky.

The Philadelphia company DroneCast is outfitting remotely operated aerial crafts with advertisers’ messages and sending them to targeted areas.

Each four-rotor flying machine can carry a banner up to 2 feet wide and 6 feet long.

It operates at about 25 feet above the ground, but has the potential to soar up to 1200 feet.

Clearly, to ensure people get the message, lower is better, and the drone’s unique ability to navigate that airspace gives it a distinct advantage.

Its route can be programmed on an iPad, including how fast to go, where to stop and hover, and when altitude changes are required.

Just because it can fly solo doesn’t mean that DroneCast is going to let it.

In the beginning, all missions will be physically tracked by actual humans tracing the craft’s route by car.

The longer-term goal is to be able to simultaneously monitor several of them remotely from a single location.

DroneCast already has 5 clients lined up, but its 19 year old founder hopes that soon the operation will expand and spread to other cities including New York and Los Angeles.