What makes for a vibrant neighborhood? It’s a combination of things – a mixture of cultures and styles, a bustling street life, and perhaps most vitally, surprise.
WILDPOSTING® TORONTO
Why Toronto?
Toronto is an exceptional place to plan and execute a street-level Wildposting® campaign. North America’s fourth-largest city, it is cosmopolitan and cultured, but also fun-loving and vibrant. Hollywood commonly flocks there to find alternative locations; Toronto often doubles for New York, and for good reason.
It is both modern and accessible and has a very open-minded attitude to the commercial use of public space. This makes it open-minded when it comes to Wildposting® campaigns too. Toronto has a long, rich history of Wildposting® for over 40 years!
Toronto is particularly strong on street art. Visitors seeking an Instagrammable moment have a lot of choice, including Graffiti Alley at 160 Rush Lane, the Toronto Wall at 101 Spadina Avenue and the Make Good Mural at 835 Bloor Street West. The city’s booming construction and art focus makes it a natural fit for spreading your brand message, product, or logo.?
Before the pandemic slowed tourism down, Toronto enjoyed a boom year in 2019. 28 million visitors flocked to the city, an increase of 3% over 2018 and a rise of 15% in just five years. Where tourists go, advertisers should follow. By their very nature, tourists spend a lot of time walking the hippest neighbourhoods of a city, and Toronto’s visitors are no exception.
Toronto is also hugely diverse, giving you the opportunity to target a particular sector of the community with language and culture-specific campaigns, or go wide and hit everyone at once.
As Scott Beck, President and CEO of Tourism Toronto puts it: “We’re a city where more than 50 percent of our population was born outside of Canada. We’re a city that’s the Canadian epicenter of culture, entertainment, sports, technology, finance, education and business. The diversity of our visitors showcases our own diversity and we’re thrilled to welcome more and more of those diverse visitors every year.”
How Wildposting® Works
Wildposting® campaigns add that unexpected element, injecting color and energy into a street scene. On hoardings, on the sides of empty buildings, these advertisements for products, events, and brands add personality and brighten up an urban environment.
It isn’t just posters either. Event and social justice advertising can use local graffiti artists or muralists to great effect to turn walls into artworks that celebrate festivals, gatherings, and local campaigns. These are positioned in high-impact locations and can sometimes outlast the events or causes they promote to become local landmarks.
Toronto is a perfect city in which to mount a guerilla campaign such as Wildposting®. The 2016 census reports that the largest age group of the city’s 2.7 million residents are those aged 25-29, with the 30-34 group close behind. Together, this slice of young people make up 15.6% of the population.
This is also the group that most commonly views OOH (out of home advertising). Analyses in the same year reported a 62% OOH viewing rate (as opposed to 48% for digital advertising) across this age group in Canada.
While it is likely that the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted this balance a little, when things open up once more, we are likely to see a new “roaring twenties”, as people rediscover the joys of high street shopping, dining, and entertainment. If you want to prepare for this likely boom period, now is an excellent time to shape your guerilla, street-level campaign.
What Wildposting® Can Be
When you hire a reputable guerilla advertising firm, they work with you to create a bespoke campaign which has these three essential components:
- Maintaining your campaign throughout your flight
- Timely Proof of Performance Reporting With Photos
- A Campaign Audit at the End To Summarize Estimated Impressions
You can even add aspects of interactivity with tear-off strips and collectable magnetic ads that passers-by take away into their homes and workplaces (further spreading your brand message).
Traditional bill posters are applied in a technique known as wheat-pasting. This involves a non-toxic, environmentally friendly liquid adhesive applied to your posters to ensure they stick firmly in place and cannot easily be removed. It’s perfect for temporary hoardings and new campaigns can simply be pasted in place of expired ones.
Escaping the Digital in 2021
There’s growing evidence of disenchantment with banner ads and pop-ups in the digital realm. A whole industry has grown up around blocking this type of advertising. Furthermore, there has been a huge amount of press of late concerning the dangers of excessive social media use, particularly amongst teens, as well as screen time overload.
In contrast, street advertising is non-invasive and ambient. It works by drawing the eye with color, bold fonts, slogans and attractive or startling images. The observer is outdoors and often walking, making this a much healthier way to absorb advertising.
Wildposting® don’t come to you; instead, you go to them.
Why Choose a Wildposting® Campaign?
Using traditional street advertising has several advantages in 2021 and beyond:
- Passers-by actually enjoy poster advertising, finding it a refreshing change to online ads
- Consumers are keen to get back outdoors; they will be well-primed for your message
- Street advertising brightens up dull or ugly urban locations and construction sites
- Wildposting® can be highly cost-effective, and easily tailored to your budget
- It is flexible and quick to realize, ideal for time-sensitive campaigns
- Well-chosen locations mean your campaigns are seen by tens of thousands (or more)
- You can advertise in proximity to premises where consumers can shop for your products
Wildposting® can target clever, impactful advertising in locations your customers already love to visit. They add real cultural value and local color to a neighborhood and give us all a breather from the digital realm, in a world rapidly opening back up to street commerce.
Why not get in touch and let us show you how to reach your customers through Wildposting®
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