Where to put up posters so they get seen

The honest answer to where to put up posters is that on any given street, two or three spots will do most of the work and the rest will do almost nothing — and you cannot reliably tell which is which by looking. What you can do is start from the places that work more often than not, then measure the ones you actually used.

Dwell time beats footfall

The instinct is to chase busy places. The high street at lunchtime, the main square, the bridge everyone crosses. Those are the busiest spots and they are frequently the worst, because a person walking at four miles an hour with somewhere to be does not stop to take out their phone.

What converts is standing still. Someone waiting has time, an idle hand and nothing to look at.

In rough order of how reliably they work:

1. Waiting places. Bus stops, tram shelters, station platforms, taxi ranks, the queue outside a club. Captive attention and a two-minute wait.
2. Queue lines and thresholds. The wall beside a cashpoint, the inside of a laundrette, the corridor to the toilets in a venue, the counter of a record shop.
3. Notice boards. University and library boards, community centres, climbing walls, bike shops. Self-selecting audiences who came to read something.
4. Windows, from inside. A café or shop window at chest height, facing out. Protected from weather, implicitly endorsed by the business, and read by people who have stopped.
5. Underpasses and stairwells. Slow, enclosed, and nobody is on their phone for any other reason.
6. Hoardings and lampposts. The classic fly-posting surfaces. High visibility, very low dwell — good for name recognition, poor for scans.

Note that the last item is the one most people start with.

Sort out permission first, because it decides your options

Rules vary by town and by surface, and the summary is short:

• Private walls and windows need the owner's permission. Ask; a lot of independent venues, cafés and shops say yes to a poster for a local gig without hesitating.
• Street furniture — lampposts, bins, utility boxes, bus shelters — is usually prohibited by the council, and fly-posting fines are real. The rule is rarely enforced against a handful of posters for a small event, which is not the same as it being allowed.
• Construction hoardings belong to the contractor, not the council or the site owner.
• Notice boards are the exception where you are simply meant to be, and where a poster can stay up for weeks instead of days.

The practical consequence: build a list of permitted spots once, keep it, and reuse it. That list is worth more than any single campaign, because it is the only part of this work that compounds.

Height, angle, weather

Small things, each of which quietly kills a poster:

• Eye height, or just below. Posters above about two metres cannot be scanned, because nobody can hold a phone up to them steadily.
• Face the flow. A poster on the side of a shelter that people approach from behind is invisible. Walk the approach before you choose the panel.
• Watch the sun. A poster in direct afternoon sun behind glass gets a reflection exactly where the QR code is, and it fades in a fortnight.
• Paste all four corners. A poster whose bottom edge has curled has lost the part where the code lives, which is the lower third.

Then measure, because the local answer is not the general one

Everything above is a prior, not an answer. The spots that work in your town are specific to your town, your audience and your poster, and the only way to find them is to record where each copy went and see what came back.

That is the workflow Wildpost is built around. Every printed copy carries its own QR code, so when you put one up you scan your own code, confirm the pin on a map and give the spot a name — "Vismarkt notice board", "Café Marleen window". From then on every scan of that copy is attributed to that place, and the campaign gets a ranked list instead of a total.

What that list tends to show, in our experience and in most people's:

• The distribution is very uneven. It is normal for the top three spots out of forty to account for half the scans.
• The winners are frequently unglamorous. Laundrettes, underpasses and one particular bus stop, rather than the prime wall you were pleased to get.
• Scans keep arriving for two to three weeks and then fall off a cliff, which tells you your actual replacement cycle.

None of that is knowable in advance. All of it is knowable after one properly recorded run, and it makes the second run substantially cheaper than the first.

A starter route for a small campaign

If you are putting up thirty posters this week and want a spread you can learn from:

• 8 in waiting places on the two routes your audience actually uses
• 6 in windows of businesses that said yes
• 6 on notice boards where they can stay up for a month
• 5 in underpasses, stairwells and corridors
• 5 on hoardings and poles, as the control group

Register each one as you go. In a fortnight you will know which of those five groups earned its share, and the split for the next thirty writes itself.

Related: how to put a QR code on a poster and reading poster scan data honestly.