07/ 25/ 2006
by Emily McMackin
When it comes to providing advertising to customers, the sky's the limit for Jay Saber—literally. Saber, owner of Woodside, Calif.-based Roof Ads, offers companies over-the-top exposure for their businesses: For between $5,000 to $200,000, Saber paints a business' name or logo across a rooftop.
Fly over San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Carlos, San Jose or Sacramento, and you'll likely spot his signs. By targeting blank, white rooftops on large commercial buildings near airports, Saber's signs reach thousands of commuters who fly in each day and can view ads from airplanes. He sees his brand of aerial advertising as the billboard of the future. "People everywhere are flying around the country, and they're looking down on rivers, buildings, streets—and roofs," he says.
A roofing contractor for 25 years, Saber first discovered his idea 10 years ago while working on a friend's roof in the southern California foothills. "It was an old house, and I was taking my time trying to do a nice job," he recalls. "My friend said, 'Don't worry about it. This ain't the Ritz.'"
As a joke, Saber cut big, black letters spelling "The Ritz" out of leftover roofing material and glued it to the white roof. A helicopter flying overhead spotted it and snapped a picture that ended up in a local newspaper. The idea surfaced again five years later when Saber looked out the window while flying into San Jose and marveled at how the rooftops resembled giant canvases. He saw a lucrative marketing niche. "We scoured the world and couldn't find anyone else doing it at the time," Saber says.
It took him three years to research the concept, obtain licenses and permits to paint roofs and get access to all Federal Aviation Administration flight plans. He worked with a vendor to develop 100 different colors of elastomeric paint—a rubberized coating that expands and contracts with temperature and can withstand high winds and downpours.
Saber's ads come with a five-year warranty and a yearly maintenance guarantee and are best visible at an altitude of 2,000 feet. Using proprietary software that grids roofs into 10 by 10 squares and writes to scale, Saber and his employees work in a "paint by number" system, going through between 100 and 1,000 gallons of paint per sign. Saber paints as many ads on leased roofs as he does on company-owned ones and offers customers in competitive industries exclusive advertising deals.
Roof Ads has taken off with the emergence of satellite imagery Web sites, such as Google Earth, Terrafly and Zillow, helping the business snag projects for bigger-name clients, including Mercedes-Benz, the Seattle Seahawks and Hewlett-Packard. And Saber, who plans to add glow-in-the-dark paint to his palette soon, sees more exciting opportunities on the horizon.
