Outdoor Advertising:
Wild Posting® How to run a successful Campaign
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What Is Wild Posting® Advertising?
Wild posting® is a form of outdoor advertising that involves posting thin paper posters side-by-side on buildings, barricades or construction site barriers, using wheatpaste (a combo of wheat flour and water) to adhere the posters.
Most campaigns have an element of timeliness by promoting a sale or event, and they’re designed to be eye-catching, the type of thing that will earn a second look in a busy urban landscape. Posters are usually placed at street-level, where motorists and pedestrians can see them.
You can think of them as public bulletin boards that swap a different surface for the bulletin board.
We’ve seen or created terrific wild posting campaigns using everything from newspaper kiosks to metal surfaces to street poles as a canvas. Creativity is baked into this approach, and the more creative you get, the more people will notice your message.
How These Ads Can Help You
AFFORDABILITY
You can pull off a robust wild posting campaign for a fraction of the price of many other forms of advertising.
BUZZ
People talk about wild posting because of its guerrilla element—it exists slightly outside the conventional. It looks illicit, even if the brand has received permission from the building’s owner to put up wild posting posters.
SOCIAL CACHET
When something generates buzz, people post about it online, giving a campaign a second life. Someone can see your ad who lives thousands of miles away.
FREQUENCY
The repeated ads help improve recall. The more someone sees an ad, the more likely they are to remember what it says and exact details about what it advertised, like the name of an album or date of a concert.
BRANDING
While you can use wild posting for promoting specific items and events, it also offers a fantastic chance to brand, helping familiarize people with your brand, logo and colors.
LONGEVITY
A wild posting campaign can stay in place for months.
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Examples of Wild Posting Campaigns
As the trademark owner of “wild posting,” we’ve run many campaigns and know the best ways to execute them. Here are a few examples of wild posting campaigns we’ve done in public spaces.
BARRICADES
You can put thin or card-stock posters along construction barricades, fences or barriers that keep the passersby from looking into the construction site. They aren’t permanent—they’ll come down with the barricade—but draw a great reaction from people walking past.
STANDARD-SIZED POSTERS
You can choose from standard-sized and oversized posters for a campaign, and both have advantages. With standard-sized posters, you can fit more of them in the space, so you might want to vary them, making every other one different.
OVERSIZED POSTERS
These take up a much bigger chunk of real estate and allow for more intricate creative. An oversized poster might be three or four times as big as a standard one. This is probably the approach most associated with traditional wild posting.
DOMINATION
Domination is exactly what it sounds like—putting up so many posters in so many places in a small area that everywhere someone looks, they’re taking in one of your posters.
Typical Cost of Wild Posting
The price of wild posting campaigns is quite affordable. Say you target 20 locations in Los Angeles. You’ll pay less than half what buying a billboard in LA costs. However, if you want to paper the city, covering entire walls across high-traffic areas, you will have to use a large budget. Request QuoteInsider Knowledge
Running a wild posting campaign can be challenging the first time.
Here are some insider tips from our media buyers who work the markets.
WHAT LOCATIONS WORK BEST?
We recommend urban areas in big cities like Chicago, Miami and Paris that have lots of pedestrian traffic. For example, in Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Silver Lake, Santa Monica and Venice are high-demand wild posting areas. In New York City, Chelsea, Soho and the Village are popular. But more generally, these locations do great:
- Urban downtowns
- Parks, especially skateboard parks (lots of walls)
- Outdoor malls
- College campuses
COMMON DIMENSIONS OF WILD POSTING
The standard size for wild posting posters is 36 inches high by 24 inches wide. Files should have a 1/8-inch bleed.
WHO WILD POSTING IS FOR
Wild posting is most popular with fashion, cannabis and entertainment brands, most notably music and movies.
HOW IT WORKS
First, you need to identify where to run your campaign and get permission from the building or site owner or vendor to post your ads. (Despite the guerrilla appearance, you don’t want to do it illegally, or the posters may get taken down.)
Most campaigns target about 20 locations and use 250 standard-sized posters. You can play up the creative element by picking a unique design. You might choose:
- Identical messages on each poster but making each one a different color
- Arranging the posters in a shape, like a heart
- Using the posters to spell out a word related to the campaign, such as an artist’s name or name of an album
To put up the posters, use wheatpaste—or you can really get cute and use something like magnets on metal surfaces for your campaign. The promotions will stay up for as long as the landlord lets them go or until another advertiser papers over them. Still, most posters have about a two-week lifespan before they start to fade.
Now that you know more about wild posting, it’s time to try it yourself. We can help. Contact us today to learn more about this effective form of advertising and start brainstorming some ideas!
