For most people, buses are a means of transportation to get around in their daily life, but the masterminds of the advertising world see a bus as a perfect moving canvas for the most creative and effective transport adverts. In a competition-fuelled digital world, the marketing industry still turns to traditional outdoor advertising with an original twist, defying normality and standing out.
Bus adverts are just one form of OOH advertising which does pretty much what it says on the tin: it’s advertising that reaches people while they’re out and about outside of their homes.
There are limited outdoor advertising options for billboards and signage- particularly in major cities and their overcrowded hotspots but buses are nimble & on wheels- bus advertising allows you to get into those hard-to-reach areas by way of driving through these districts via major thoroughfares in cities, especially in cities such as London. London is a hub bus advertising, and it’s a good place to run bus advertising campaigns.
Bus advertising also comes in many shapes and sizes; making it accessible to all kinds of advertisers and works with whatever kind of budgets they have.
When advertising on a bus, play off of the fact that it’s a bus—warp peoples’ perspective of what they think they know they’re looking at. Use the doors, wheels, lights, even the passengers inside the windows or on top of the double decker to be playful with the creative and make the bus look like something it’s not! Bus advertising truly is a canvas to play with, to ensure you capture your audience’s attention!
Be contextually relevant—consider where this bus is and who will see it. How can you leverage the context of the environment to get attention? Consumers love being seen, represented or feeling like they’re in on the joke. Make location-specific references to make connections with the people that see it.
Buses are far from the only means of transportation that have had adverts plastered all over (and even inside of) them. Other OOH transport vehicles include trains, taxis, and even aeroplanes. They’re effective because you can’t skip them and it’s hard to ignore them.
Partially transparent window coverage techniques and see-through graphics have made it easier than ever for advertisers to ‘wrap up’ the entire bus, including the windows (except for the front ones, for obvious reasons). This means that advertisers and artists have a lot more flexibility when it comes to showing off their product or spreading their public service message. Two different types of vinyl can be used, one for the windows and one for the body of the bus. In essence, bus advertising is the perfect mobile way to capture your audience’s attention, everywhere.
See the below examples of some of our campaigns, and other clever uses of bus advertising!
