The Unique Advantages of Mural Advertising

Advertisers and brands are always looking to use creative methods to 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 creatively transform a city’s landscape. 

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.

Seamless Offline to Online Integration

Mural advertising enables brands to achieve cross-platform sharing by occupying and ‘taking over’ large visually imposing spaces in cities, 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. 

From impressionable mural advertisements, more people will recognise your brand and what you stand for.

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. The use of strategic OOH ensures high ad frequency and therefore aids brand and product recall. Further to this, brands crossing into the creative use of OOH, such as mural advertising, leads to stronger ties with the audience interaction, building a deeper connection between the brand or product and consumers. 

Drive Interaction 

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

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 interaction with calls to action, including more relevant search results, website visitors, and app downloads. 

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 and using original tactics such as mural advertising and brand activations to amplify their campaign and capture audiences’ attention in a unique way. 

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, enabling 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 by using the QR to activate a Mobile First interactive AR campaign with mini-game challenges.

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 and there we use non-PVC and 100% recyclable materials for the taxi 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.