news Who Owns the Sky?



Photos by Kaori Furue/Torontoist.



If you live or work downtown, and a bunch of white foam people have been floating by you, tumbling into buildings and onto the ground and dissipating, or rising ever-higher up through the clouds, please don’t freak out: they’re just (another) marketing campaign.



Jim Schwartz (who we have to thank for creating the Toronto Sun Sucks blog that we just wrote about), tipped us off this morning to the creations, sending us the dramatic video below. Schwartz also pointed us in the direction of Flogos, short for “foam logos,” a company that does exactly this kind of thing. The company’s FAQ page—which does a way better job of explaining how Flogos are made than we ever could—notes that Flogos “can travel from 1 to 30 miles and float as high as 5000 feet,” and are, with every machine that produces them (the company recommends “at least two”), capable of popping out at a rate of one “every 15 to 50 seconds.”



Torontoist spoke to Flogos Canada President Tom Richard on the phone this afternoon, and he confirmed that the vaguely horrifying human shapes are rising out and up from Front Street. While the company is doing some promotion right now in several cities for Lindt (you know, the chocolate company; because when you think delicious, you think foam), the ones you may have spotted today are part of a demonstration his company is putting on for the Canadian Special Events Marketing Expo (CSEME), which is itself put on by Canadian Event Perspectives Magazine. In other words, these Flogos are advertising for advertising itself.

And if that all hurts your head anywhere as much as it hurt ours, you probably wish there was some place more soothing to look to than the sky.

Additional reporting by Kaori Furue.