See query. Projecting at night on a good cumulus cloud bank, say. Or using my cloud gathering beam (patent pending) to corral them and make pictures and text.
(I had a dream that I went to look at the Supermoon and an ad was running on it, and “…there oughta be a law…”)
I can see that shining a really bright light onto clouds could be dangerous to passing aircraft, and I don’t doubt the FAA has some rules about that.
But otherwise, I doubt it’s illegal to do something that there’s no known way of doing.
I guess you could do it with a laser, but they are operated under strict rules. Most of them concentrate on any members of the public that might be affected, but passing aircraft are also catered for:
How is this different from making your own clouds in the shape of the text you want, which is apparently legal since it happens all the time.
Done that. E. S Turner’s The Shocking History of Advertising mentioned it long ago, though I don’t want to check
The old boy does mention it in a letter to the Press in 2002:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3573352/Plastering-adverts-over-the-White-Cliffs-of-Dover.html
*But the real buzz was in outdoor advertising. By the 1890s, the sign “Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted” was everywhere, and everywhere defied. Far worse were the giant billboards that disfigured much of the habitable world. Chief offenders were the great pill-makers, Thomas Holloway and Thomas Beecham. Holloway had advertised on the Great Pyramid (where Thackeray once unfurled a Punch banner) and Beecham was concentrating on promoting his wares (“Worth a guinea a box”) on the sails of yachts.
*
The White Cliffs of Dover were not spared. Huge posters advertising breakfast oats were hoisted there and wherever mariners made landfall. The walls of Arctic fjords, the faces of the Alps, the rocks of Nevada - all were harnessed to commerce. This was the graffiti of an age that knew nothing of modern graffiti. The sky itself was now at risk. Advertising on the clouds was tried in Chicago in 1893, but sky-writing, sky-shouting and similar fancies had to wait for the 1920s.
It’s a bad world.
Harry Grindell Matthews invented a working sky projector in 1931. It apparently was legal back then.
Here’s another article from 1933about it.
It would get in the way of the Bat-Signal.
In Heinlein’s novella, The Man Who Sold The Moon, 7-Up and Coca-Cola (under very slightly obscured names) were bidding on the rights to put an advertisement on the face of the Moon, to be seen from Earth.
And Chairface started to write his name across the face of the Moon, before the Tick stopped him.
Oh, I just remembered:
In Arthur C. Clarke’s short story Watch This Space, a team member tweaks a scientific experiment, involving the release of sodium gas, by putting a template in the release mechanism. This modification doesn’t affect the experiment in any way; the gas is released and analyzed normally. But, when the gas cloud emerges from behind the shadow of the Moon, it is illuminated by the Sun, and flashes the Coca-Cola logo to the entire visible hemisphere of the Earth.
Not sure why Coke is the target of both Clarke’s and Heinlein’s '50s-era stories.
Coke was the most famous international brand on Earth. It marketed its logo everywhere, on every surface. Nobody marketed like Coca-Cola. Whole books have been written about its ubiquitous marketing. If any company were to put its name on the moon, it would be by default Coke.
What in the world is sky-shouting? or similar fancies? Maybe we can revive it, whatever it is.