Odd Jobs: Sky Writing is Just as Hard as You Think It Is

Suzanne Asbury-Oliver, 53, still gets wistful when she talks about her former employer, PepsiCo. “It was a whole different era when we worked for them,” she says. “It was easy, or much easier, to stay busy. We toured for 33 weeks in a row. We had nine months solid on the road.” But ever since Pepsi retired their skywriting program in 2000, after almost seven decades, Asbury-Oliver and her husband and co-pilot, Steve Oliver, 66, have had to work a little harder to pay their bills. Today, she says, they do maybe 15 corporate events a year, as well as hundreds of freelance jobs. “We do everything from marriage proposals to commercial stuff,” she says. They’ve announced a tour for Lady Gaga in the skies of Miami and given a congratulatory message to a BMX race champion in the horizon of San Bernardino, Calif. Asbury-Oliver doesn’t have exact numbers, but she guesses that in a typical year they write 500 sky messages in more than 150 locations nationwide.

It helps that they have little or no competition. Asbury-Oliver is often touted as the nation’s only active female professional skywriter, but she and Oliver aren’t unique merely because of her gender. “If you Google skywriting,” says Oliver, “there are about a half-dozen places. But basically they’re all brokers and when they get a contract, they call us and we do the job.” There are, Oliver and Asbury-Oliver admit, several professional skywriters out there, but few work with any consistency. “They do this on the side,” Asbury-Oliver says. “Because you can’t make a living at it. We’re the only people who’ve made an actual career out of skywriting, at least these days.”