The Unique Advantages of Mural Advertising

Advertisers and brands are always on the lookout for creative ways they can connect with captivate the attention of outdoor audiences in urban spaces. 

Mural advertising ‘street art’ concerns visually compelling large paintings featured on warehouses, industrial buildings, bridges, residential houses, and dedicated commercial outdoor advertising spaces that integrate seamlessly into a city’s landscape. 

What Is Out-of-Home Mural Advertising? 

OOH mural advertising is when brands use the talents of creative-minded street artists to design and paint murals on the walls and surfaces of buildings to help advertise their products or services in outdoor spaces.

What better way to reach and make an impact on hard to reach audiences in cities than with vibrant bold mural advertisements? 

The Positive Results of Mural Advertising for Brands 

Maximise Reach

Not only can large-scale mural advertising pieces reach on-street audiences, such as pedestrians, city motorists, office workers, and shoppers, but they can also be seen by other audiences, such as train passengers or motorway users. 

Mural advertising is a medium that maximises reach via social shares. Hand Painted Art has seen a resurgence in recent years in line with the rise of social media advertising.

Offline > Online Interaction

Mural advertising enables brands to achieve cross-platform sharing by how it occupies and ‘takes over’ a large visually imposing space in a city, such as the side of a building, a large wall, or a bridge arch. Creating these environments encourages the public to take out their mobiles and share the mural art on their social media accounts – getting the campaign more traction.

Elevated Brand Awareness 

Heightened top of funnel brand awareness is another upside of deploying mural advertising with skilled street artists in busy cities. 

More people will know and recognise your brand and what you stand for from impressionable mural advertisements.

Improved Brand Recall Through High Ad Frequency

A major part of outdoor advertising is making sure you stay right at the forefront of consumers’ minds, that way when they come to make a purchase or want to compare products, your brand will be one of the first ones they think of. High ad frequency therefore aids brand recall.

Drive Interaction 

Branded mural artwork as an Out-of-Home media format can also be highly effective at driving interaction from consumers. 

Making your mural advertising as interactive as possible by using QR codes to promote discounts is a clever idea and a great way to push interaction with outdoor audiences.

How to Measure Uplift From Mural Advertising

Tracking social media engagements is one way to measure the impact of mural advertising campaigns, e.g. increases in followers and likes on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. 

Another way of measuring uplift from mural advertising campaigns is higher app download numbers. 

Rises in footfall at retail spaces are an alternative method for businesses to measure commercial improvements brought about by mural advertising efforts. 

A specialist street art organisation recently incorporated ‘Hypercell monitor’ audience measurement technology at some of its most popular mural locations across the UK to collect data on the average footfall and number of ‘dwellers’ in a given area when the wall is unpainted. Hypercell technology measures the uplift in the number of ‘dwellers’, showing how murals attract engaged audiences.

Examples of Impressive Mural Advertising Campaigns 

Brands are adapting to this shift in outdoor audiences’ behaviour. Original tactics such as Mural Advertising, Activations or Brand Experiential to amplify their campaign. Uniquely capturing audiences’ attention. 

Here are a few examples of how advertisers gain this cut-through with this new form of advertising. 

Which? Mural Advertising Campaign Mare Street, Hackney

Partnering with a mural painting company, Which? displayed one of the largest QR codes in London with their hand-painted mural advertisement on a canvas of 198 metres squared on 100 Mare Street, Hackney. 

The QR code mural advertisement at 100 Mare Street is an interactive artwork, meaning that it enables outdoor audiences to access contextually relevant digital Which? content by scanning it on their smartphones.

Klarna’s Mythical Mural Paintings with QR Codes  

The Fintech financial services provider Klarna wanted to dispel and debunk some myths and misconceptions around their product throughout London, Manchester, and Birmingham. 

In Klarna’s Mythbuster Challenge, the answers were unveiled by outdoor audiences interacting with the QR codes in each painting. 

Bombay Sapphire’s 4 Piece Mural Campaign

Bombay Sapphire gin’s distinctive sapphire blue bottle owned the space and created a place in the landscape of Manchester, London, Brighton, and Edinburgh

The brand launched its ‘Discover the Possibilities Within’ 4-piece mural campaign in 2019 captivating unforgettable staple brand colours in the paintwork. 

Combine Mural Advertising with Transit Media to Elevate Your OOH Campaigns 

Mural advertising is a creative format that is able to attract the attention of outdoor audiences. 

However, one drawback of mural advertising is that it is static. Why not elevate the value of your OOH campaigns and further increase your reach by combining it with moving media? 

We at Drovo are proud to have the largest carbon-neutral committed fleet in the UK, with a network of over 40,000+ drivers. 

We offer both supersides and full taxi wraps in 13 UK cities, and our dedicated team provide you with a white-glove service. We own a production facility where we use non-PVC and 100% recyclable materials for the taxi advertising campaign vehicle wraps. 

Looking to complement your mural advertising? Drovo’s taxi and on-vehicle digital advertising screens moving media formats are the perfect addition.