A new client of Communiqué PR is spearheading the introduction of consumer drone services in the U.S. and the media are taking notice.

Cape Productions (Cape) is a drone video service for ordinary people who love to engage in action sports, with a current focus on capturing amazing footage of friends and family shredding the slopes at ski resorts across the country. Consumers at these locations are able to use Cape’s service to have their experiences filmed automatically via drone and edited by Cape’s professional video team. Shortly thereafter, customers receive personalized, professionally edited videos of themselves to watch and share with friends and family. Essentially, it’s like hiring a personal film crew – all you do is ski and wait for the video to be delivered.

The FAA and Regulating Drones

One of the major obstacles for many businesses to overcome (depending on their specific area of focus) is navigating and adhering to all federal regulations relating to their product. This is particularly true in the areas of healthcare or car manufacturing or heavy industry when there are genuine concerns about consumer safety and/or how the service can impact the environment. For the drone consumer industry specifically, which is still in its infancy, regulations are much less established and business and consumers alike who want to utilize drones anxiously wait for guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as they pursue their drone ambitions.

There are obvious safety considerations when dealing with drone technology. As with any piece of advanced tech, sometimes the mechanics simply don’t work or fail at the wrong time. Cape not only understood this fact when creating the business, but welcomed the challenge of ensuring that its service is safe for anyone who wished to use it. It knew from the onset how important working with the FAA would be in creating a scalable business model for its drone video service and wanted to go above and beyond any regulations set forth to manage its operation.

To that end, Cape has worked closely with the FAA since its founding to ensure that it was compliant with all regulatory requirements and that their service was legal and safe. In fact, Cape has conducted thousands of flights across the globe in places with extremely harsh conditions and still has a 100-percent safety record.

Cape Granted Unique FAA Exemption

At the end of 2015, Cape received word from the FAA that they had been granted an amendment to the company’s existing Section 333 exemption for commercial drone operations. In a nutshell, the exemption is tailored specifically to Cape’s operations and makes them the first drone operator in the U.S. legally allowed to fly drones within 500 feet of customers and in an area wider than a closed set.

What does that mean exactly? In this precedent-setting exemption, the FAA is now allowing Cape to fly its drones much closer to people and outside of a closed movie set – the first time this has ever been allowed for a consumer drone service. The previous restrictions on where and how close a drone could fly hampered many potential consumer and commercial uses for drones, and this amendment is groundbreaking for the industry as it lays the foundation for different drone operations in the future. But more importantly, the exemption now allows Cape the ability to create even more stunning videos of people engaged in action sports and opens the possibility for them to expand its model into different areas where people would want to hire a drone for filming purposes. (Some of the world’s greatest athletes, including the U.S. Ski Team, have also started using Cape to enhance their training).

Media Interest

Communiqué PR understood that the media would be interested in this regulatory news and immediately helped Cape build a strategy to maximize coverage for when it made the announcement to the public. The process was straight forward, but had to be executed with precision: First, identify the heavy hitters and beat reporters covering drone news and regulatory updates. Second, draft a release which incorporates key messages and talking points centered on the importance of the news and which ultimately ties back to Cape and its service. Lastly, share the news under embargo with prioritized media to help seed stories and shape the media coverage when the news breaks.

As a result, media interest in the announcement has been expansive, in-depth, and inclusive of the core messaging Cape wanted highlighted. Here are a few examples of the coverage:

• Fast Company: You Can’t Use a Drone to Film Yourself Skiing but these Ex-Googlers Will do it for You
• USA Today: FAA Approves Ski-video Drones
• BuzzFeed: Drone Photography Company Wins FAA Exemption Ahead Of New Regulations
• MarketWatch:  This is the First Business to (Legally) Fly Drones Around Americans’ Heads
• Forbes: Ex-Google Employees’ Drones Turn Weekend Warriors Into Ski Movie Stars
• Drone 360: Cape Productions Granted First-of-a-Kind Permission from the FAA for Drone Video Service

Communiqué PR congratulates Cape on its recent achievement and the wonderful media coverage it has received to date. This is only the beginning for a company that has ambitions to be the largest, most trusted drone video operator in the world, and we here at Communiqué PR are dedicated to making that happen.

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