Transit advertising

Transit advertising puts a message on things that move, and on the places people wait for them. It covers bus sides, rears and full wraps, tram and metro exteriors, taxi livery, and the panels inside the network — platform 48-sheets, escalator runs, concourse banners and interior car cards. The unit you buy is the vehicle or the panel; the product is the route.

It behaves less like a billboard than it looks. Vehicles are booked as fleets across a four-week cycle, installation happens overnight at a depot, artwork is cut to a template that differs by chassis, and the audience is defined by where the route goes rather than where any single panel stands.

On the road: a superside runs roughly 9.5 metres by 1.8 along the offside of a double-decker and is the standard large panel; a streetliner is the shorter version; a T-side wraps the panel around a window; a rear panel is around two metres wide and is read by everyone stuck behind the bus. A full wrap covers the vehicle including perforated window film. Taxi livery ranges from door panels to a full wrap with interior tip-seat cards.

Off the road, the same operators sell the estate around the network: 48-sheet and 16-sheet panels on platforms, 4-sheets in ticket halls, cross-track panels read from the opposite platform for the length of a wait, escalator panel runs sold as a whole ride rather than singly, suspended concourse banners, and floor and gateline graphics. Airports sit at the top of this group — long dwell, a captive audience and prices to match.

Vehicle advertising is sold per vehicle across a four-week cycle, and four weeks is normally the minimum because printing and fitting cost the same whether the vinyl stays on for a month or a year. You buy a number of vehicles on a named route or out of a named garage, and the price per vehicle reflects the traffic on that route and the streets it covers. Twelve buses on a central corridor cost more than twenty on an outer-suburb route running the same mileage.

Station and platform inventory is usually sold in two-week cycles, in line with the poster sites it sits alongside, and is often bought as a package — a full station domination, or a run of panels along one escalator. Print, overnight installation and removal are quoted inside the listed price far more often than on a roadside billboard, because only the operator's own crews are allowed near the vehicles and the track.

For vehicles, the audience is a route calculation rather than a site one. It combines the mileage a vehicle covers, the streets it covers it on, the hours it is in service and the number of vehicles carrying your panel, then applies the same visibility discounts used for fixed panels. The result is a daily impressions figure for the fleet rather than for any one bus — which is the right way to read it, because no single vehicle is anywhere in particular.

For station panels, measurement is closer to indoor screens: entries and exits at the station, adjusted for where the panel sits and how long people stand near it. Dwell is what makes this inventory valuable. A platform wait is measured in minutes, not the second and a half a driver gives a roadside board, which is why transit is the one outdoor environment where a panel can carry more than six words.

Artwork is built to the operator's template for that exact vehicle type. A superside is not the same shape on every chassis, so a design that fits one double-decker will be cropped on another and a fleet campaign often needs several versions of the same creative. Rear panels have to leave the registration plate, lights and access hatches clear. Wraps use perforated film on the windows and must leave the driver's glass, destination blinds and legal markings untouched.

Production is cast vinyl, printed and laminated, then fitted overnight at the depot while the vehicle is off the road — the reason ten working days is a normal deadline and why every panel in a fleet has to be supplied together. Order spares. A bus is a vehicle before it is a poster site: panels get scuffed in the depot, clipped in traffic and jet-washed weekly, and a replacement is only quick if the vinyl is already there.

Transit reaches places that have no advertising sites at all. A bus travels through residential streets, past schools and along high streets where no owner could get consent for a panel, and it does it again every twenty minutes, so frequency along a corridor builds fast. Inside the network, the dwell time makes it the best outdoor environment for a message that needs more than a glance — a proposition, a code, an actual offer.

The frustrations are all about control. You cannot say where a given vehicle will be, or guarantee that all twelve are on the road every day, because vehicles go into maintenance and get moved between routes. Sides are read at an angle by people at street level, so tall type and pale colours fail. And a panel on a vehicle gets dirty in a way a glazed 6-sheet never does, particularly through winter.

Establish the fleet guarantee: how many vehicles, on which routes, and what happens if one is off the road for part of the cycle — replacement, an extension, or nothing. Then confirm that print, fitting and removal sit inside the price, and that you get depot proof photographs of every vehicle rather than one representative shot.

On the creative side, get the templates before you design rather than after, and get the operator's approval process and timescale in writing — most reserve a veto over content, and some categories, political advertising in particular, are excluded outright. For station inventory, ask what else is on sale around your panel: a cross-track 48-sheet loses most of its value if three more are booked either side of it.