Future of skywriting up in the air in Las Vegas

Two years ago, when Greg Stinis walked out to his Tiger AA-5 airplane at Jean Airport, it wasn't to run the engine for maintenance. Skywriting jobs came regularly then.

Since the recession began, every kind of advertising is down in Las Vegas. But aerial advertising is vanishing into thin air. Banner ads, which once blitzed the Strip weekly, now hit only key conventions. No blimps have buzzed since the M Resort grounded theirs last March. And skywriting jobs are down to once every three weeks -- from three per week in 2008.

"It just doesn't make any sense," says Stinis, 69, the valley's only resident skywriter.

Stinis -- who flies for, and owns, a company called Skytypers -- last blew smoke over Las Vegas in late January. He wrote "N (heart) B," using the white vapor that results when a biodegradable paraffin is injected into the hot exhaust manifold of his engine at 10,000 feet.

"But that kind of work isn't enough," he says.

Old-school skywriting pays Stinis $1,800 per gig. The reason he relocated from Los Angeles seven years ago was to sell Skytyping to corporate clients. This patented technology -- which can be employed only by Stinis' company -- uses computer-timed dots of smoke to form letters taller than the Empire State Building. It requires a series of five planes flying in formation and costs $8,500 for a string of 10 messages.

"But nobody's returning my calls anymore," Stinis says.

Two or three Skytyping campaigns per year blanketed the Las Vegas skies until 2008, when Stinis flew for the Southern Nevada Water Authority above Aviation Nation and announced the Encore job application Web site wynnjobs.com.

Since then? Zip. Zero. A giant smoke ring.

Stinis' five other West Coast planes are still busy Skytyping from their base in Chino, Calif., along with the pilots Stinis hires on a freelance basis. Today, they'll cover the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in Fontana, Calif.; on April 16, the Toyota Grand Prix in Long Beach, Calif.

"But nothing in Las Vegas," Stinis says. "I'm ready to write messages, like, 'What's wrong, Vegas? Everybody else still wants it.' "

Stinis has finished running his engine. Now he's huddled over the trunk of his Lexus, displaying a photo scrapbook of his favorite Skytyping campaigns: "COPPERTONE" over Long Island in 1980, "I WANT MY MTV" over the New York State Fair a year or two later, the Olympics logo over Los Angeles in 1984.

"Those are my rings," he says, beaming.

Skywriting is in Stinis' blood. His dad, Andy, was one of the first. From 1932 to 1953, Andy repeatedly scribbled "PEPSI" over the Manhattan skyline. (His airplane hangs from the Smithsonian's ceiling.)

"I was skywriting before I was born," Stinis says, explaining that Andy took his pregnant wife with him once or twice.

Stinis relocated from New York, where his company also still has a fleet, to Los Angeles in 1965, then to Las Vegas in 2003.

"I came out here saying, 'This is the land of opportunity,' " he says.

For a while, Stinis appeared to be right.

"But in this economy, unless there's a perfect storm of events, the opportunity turns into that cherry on top," says Jeremy Thompson, media director for R&R Partners, the Las Vegas ad agency that hired Stinis for both his 2008 Skytyping jobs (via an aerial advertising company called Sky-Tacular).

"It's great to have and it can work," Thompson says, explaining his cherry analogy, "but you don't have to have it to have a really nice sundae."

The problem is that, compared to other kinds of advertising, skywriting is considered risky. It depends on perfect weather: low wind, very few clouds, and a temperature that makes people want to stand outside long enough to look up. In addition, it's transient, lasting an average of four minutes before blurring.

"You don't have a stable platform like you do with a billboard, or even with the signage on the side of a building," says Michael LaTour, marketing department chair for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "That's going to introduce more variability to it. And the fact that it's not in the normal line of sight -- all of that is going to make for potential complications."

The national companies with big advertising budgets would rather risk them skywriting over more populated areas, such as Manhattan or the beaches of California, where the payoff is bigger. (When Stinis flies over Los Angeles, his potential audience is 10 million, versus 2 million in Las Vegas for the same price.)

"Here in the valley," Thompson says, "I think there's a look to how are we going to tie ROI (return on investment) to this."

Stinis listens to these arguments and shakes his head. He has heard them before.

"But I am probably one-hundredth the cost of everything that they're already using," he says. "I'm fifty cents to reach a thousand people. They're spending fifty dollars, and I'm much more impressive."

In addition, Stinis argues that a single Skytyping campaign can include not only Las Vegas, but a short flight to California to get the 10,000-foot-long word out to those 10 million potential tourists.

"I keep scratching my head, saying, 'God, I could change the economy here in Vegas if they'd only use me,' " Stinis says. "And I really want to. I live here, and I want things to be better."

Contact reporter Corey Levitan at clevitan@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0456.