Look at Simon’s face!
North Richland Hills-based Sky Elements, a drone show company who once used a QR code in the sky to rick roll people in Dallas, went on the TV show America’s Got Talent to do a performance. The problem is their type of artistic performance doesn’t fit inside the building or work in daylight so everyone including the judges had to go outside when it was dark.
Once outside the team put on a spectacular show that had the AGT judges completely mesmerized. In the end Simon gave the team a golden buzzer but it appears there was some kind of rule violation or rule change and the team got a second golden buzzer making them the first act in AGT history to get a double golden buzzer.
Watch the Video Here:
The team performed a drone show that paid tribute to American spaceflight that started with a staged rocket taking off flying through clouds and reaching space, then an astronaut floating in space holding a waving USA flag, and finally revealing the face of the astronaut to be Simon Cowell all while a custom mix of sounds from NASA missions and songs about American spaceflight played in the background.
You too can catch a Sky Elements drone show in your area, check out their list of upcoming events.
Business Impact:
Jared Guynes, a Dallas-area based social media expert, posted about this on his Facebook page. You might know Jared from his Epic 90’s party over a decade ago that featured Ninja Turtles and Vanilla Ice among other things or his Nerf battles at US football stadiums.
For what it’s worth I am fairly certain Jared does social media for Sky Elements since he’s been posting about them for years non-stop and they often do things in line with what he tells clients to do (i.e. get a Guinness World Record for example).
The opening part of the act felt scripted (as in the discussion about the performance being too big and needing to go outside) but once the show started it did not feel scripted. There’s a small chance this was a “Native Advertisement” and some of Sky Elements competitors or detractors might claim this but I doubt it since there wasn’t a push to hire them at any point during or after the performance.
So if the business impact wasn’t a direct connection to sales then what might it be? Well, Sky Elements biggest customers are professional sports teams and municipalities and decision makers here are far less likely to be simply going to a search engine and typing “best drone show company” and are more likely to make decisions based on visual evidence that it might increase the value of their events as well as recent hype. A performance like this, eliciting the response it did from the judges and the crowd, racking up hundreds of thousands of online views – that is brand exposure and a “demo” that might cost anywhere from several hundred thousand to a million dollars to reproduce through advertising and other marketing efforts.
Not only did they win some sort of accolade (i.e. the first double golden buzzer) but they also successfully demonstrated what a custom drone show might look like and AGT assisted with camera footage from the ground and sky. I can guarantee these will be mentioned while pitching their services and used to convince potential clients to hire them over other competitors for things like halftime shows and 4th of July displays.
Finally, they might be able to leverage coverage of an event like this for SEO by requesting any journalists who write about it to link to their website, and of course for growing their social media followings as well.
No clue what the cost to put this on was but consider they had to fly out 6 employees from DFW Airport to Pasadena, CA, they had to pay staff to develop the show and someone to edit / create the musical backing, and of course own all of the drones involved (I am guessing over 1,000) the total cost would be somewhere around $1.8 million but of course they own all of the drones involved (approximately $1,700 / ea) already so excluding that I would estimate the cost of travel and labor to be around $11,000 all in and we might say it costs around $15,000 to $20,000 if we wanted to add in the cost of consulting and other related things that led up to the performance.
Featured image a screenshot from the above embedded video by AGT
