Street advertising glossary: 16 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 is cheap, strong, and removable with water, which is why the technique has outlived every adhesive fad.

The generic activity is postering en masse on street-level surfaces — the same discipline as wheatpasting or flyposting. Worth knowing: 'Wild Posting' is a registered trademark of Pearl Media in the U.S., so vendors using the phrase as a service name are borrowing a brand, not 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, construction sites, and retail strips. Snipes trade the single big statement of a wall takeover for frequency: the same image met five times in three blocks.

Paste-up is the hands-on craft term for wheatpaste installation: positioning the sheet, brushing it flat, sealing the face coat. '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 often carries an unauthorized connotation. 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 actually crosses it. The format reads mid-stride, costs less than wall work, and the chalk variant washes away — which is what keeps its legal profile clean.

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 entire regulatory argument for it.

Postering the temporary plywood fencing around construction sites. Hoarding is the single best canvas in street advertising: large, flat, street-level, and temporary by definition. The property owner's consent turns a blight surface into a brand wall — the Momentous LA campaign ran exactly this way.

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, signal poles, and sign posts at eye level — read during the walk-signal wait, which is a captive few seconds of attention. Ours go only where the surface owner or program permits them; utility equipment stays off the route.

Out-of-home: every ad format that reaches people outside their house — billboards, transit, 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, surprise, or craft rather than bought media slots — wheatpaste walls, stencils, street teams, takeovers. The term is broader than street postering: every wheatpaste campaign is guerrilla marketing, 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 — 236 logged placements on a single Denver-metro run, for example.

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. A freeway billboard gets one to two seconds at speed; a poster wall on a walking block gets 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.

Covering a full wall or frontage edge to edge with one campaign — six jumbo sheets across a storefront rather than one poster among many. Takeovers read as ownership of the surface, which is why occupied walls stop attracting stray flyers; The Father's House SF ran exactly this play.