Street advertising glossary: 17 terms, defined by the crew that installs them

Wheatpasting is installing paper posters on walls using a flour-and-water adhesive, brushed under and over the sheet so the poster bonds flat to the surface. Done commercially, it means printed campaign posters hand-installed on private walls with the owner's written consent, photographed placement by placement. The paste costs almost nothing to mix and releases with water, which is why crews still reach for it.

The generic activity is postering en masse on street-level surfaces, the same discipline as wheatpasting or flyposting. The phrase itself is owned: Wild Posting® is a live U.S. registered trademark held by Dash Two, Inc., so vendors using it as a service name are borrowing a brand rather than naming a category. The category terms are wheatpasting, paste-up, or flyposting.

A snipe is a smaller-format poster placed in high-density repetition along a corridor, the checkerboard of identical sheets you see around venues and retail strips. Snipes trade the single big statement of a wall takeover for frequency, so a walker meets the same image several times inside a few blocks.

Paste-up is the hands-on craft term for wheatpaste installation: positioning the sheet and brushing it flat before the face coat goes on. 'Paste-up poster campaign' and 'wheatpaste campaign' describe the same work; paste-up emphasizes the hand-install craft, wheatpaste the adhesive.

The British and Irish term for the same practice, putting up posters on street surfaces. In UK usage it usually carries an unauthorized connotation, and English and Welsh councils can issue fixed penalty notices for it. The commercial, permissioned version is what this glossary calls wheatpasting.

A stencil design applied to pavement in chalk-based or temporary spray, placed where foot traffic crosses it. The format reads mid-stride and costs less than wall work. The chalk variant washes away on its own, which keeps the conversation with a property owner short.

Also called clean advertising or clean-tagging. Instead of adding material, the crew pressure-washes the design INTO dirty pavement through a stencil, so the image is made of cleaned surface. Nothing is applied, which is the whole argument the format rests on.

Postering the temporary plywood fencing around construction sites. Hoarding gives street advertising a rare canvas: large, flat, at eye level, and temporary by definition. The property owner's consent turns a blight surface into a brand wall, which is how the Momentous campaign in Los Angeles ran.

Large-format printed material wrapped around sidewalk scaffolding, turning the structure itself into building-scale media. Wraps run bigger than posters and are engineered as one printed piece rather than pasted sheets.

Vertical adhesive panels installed on light poles and sign posts at eye level, read during the walk-signal wait. Local rules differ a lot, and some cities cap the size or keep signs off traffic-signal poles entirely. Ours go only where the surface owner or the local posting program permits them, and utility equipment stays off the route.

Out-of-home: every ad format that reaches people outside their house, from billboards and transit to street furniture and street-level work like wheatpaste. DOOH is the digital subset (screens). Street-level formats are OOH bought at footfall height instead of highway height.

Campaign work that earns attention through placement and craft rather than bought media slots: wheatpaste walls, stencils, street teams, takeovers. Jay Conrad Levinson named the idea in his 1984 book, aimed at companies with more nerve than budget. The term is broader than street postering, since every wheatpaste campaign is guerrilla marketing and not every guerrilla stunt involves paste.

The documentation standard this crew works to: every placement photographed on install with coordinates logged, delivered as a map and photo set. It replaces estimated impressions with a verifiable record of what went up and where. One Denver west-metro run logged 236 placements that way.

Crew-distributed promotion on foot: handbills, flyers, product sampling, postering runs. In street advertising it usually means the human-distribution layer that complements installed formats.

How long a person is actually in front of the placement. Federal Highway Administration eye-tracking research measured the average glance toward a roadside billboard at about one second. A poster wall on a walking block holds someone for seconds to minutes, and a pole sticker owns the walk-signal wait. Dwell is the core argument for buying street-level instead of highway-height.

A street poster installed with real product samples attached, in tear-off strips or mounted packs, that passersby can take with them. The poster does the brand work of a paste-up while the samples put the product in a hand, and re-photographing the strips later shows how much of the sample stock moved. Momentm ran four takeaway posters carrying 40 supplement stick packs across one New York campaign.

Covering a full wall or frontage edge to edge with one campaign: six jumbo sheets across a street-level wall rather than one poster among many. Takeovers read as ownership of the surface instead of a visit to it. The Father's House SF ran exactly this play on Ocean Avenue.