Legal Graffiti: Ads or Icons, Consumers Wonder

Permission-based graffiti programs, created by graffiti artists and with the art work placed only on leased surfaces, have become a hot way of reaching consumers, and several companies with graffiti programs in cities such as New York, LA, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Detroit, Dallas, and Austin are making programs available to advertisers, writes Media Life.

Graffiti ads are spray-painted on legally leased wall space by skilled artists (as with Time magazine’s Cope2 cover), on bricks for a more permanent ad, on canvasses, or on other leased surfaces (subway trains, for Atari’s Graffiti-thon, for example). While murals typically stay up four to eight weeks, in some cases they remain long enough to become neighborhood icons.

For example, when Disney wanted to bring Mickey Mouse back into popular culture, the company opened archives to artists and “told them to do what they thought was cool. The artists picked old black-and-white movie cells, or cartoon strips, to paint in trendy neighborhoods in Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto,” said Alt Terrain CEO Adam Salacuse. “I was hanging out [on the Lower East Side] one night and heard someone say that he was at the place across the street from the Mickey Mouse mural.”

Often, he says, consumers don’t realize the murals are ads.

Legal graffiti, generally 150 to 350 square feet, is geared toward a younger demographic. A lead time of four to six weeks works best.