Advertising Meets Remote Sensing

Either some people are just downright clever or have a lot of time on their hands. But there it was, a double-page spread advertisement for Lexus in this week’s Sports Illustrated magazine that utilized thumbnail-sized satellite imagery to spell the phrase "Further than they length of every paved road on the planet" to support how many miles Lexus hybrid automobiles have driven.

Each satellite image in the ad was cropped to show a road segment or other land feature depicting a letter of the alphabet. For example, using the image at right, you can see that it might be used for the letter "C" and so each word was spelled using a different satellite image.

The credits for the contributors to this ad read like a "who’s who" of the geospatial data sector including the usual suspects such as GeoEye, Tele Atlas, DigitalGlobe, the USGS, Aerodata International, Spot, Map Data Sciences, Europa Technologies, and several others. And given this plethora of contributors, it is quite obvious that the imagery has an international flavor as well. So, indeed, someone spent a lot of time searching for that perfect image that had just the right configuration of terrain and man-made objects to spell success.