The London Underground has over 1.2 billion passengers annually, making the numerous advertising spaces available very desireable. Unlike buses and overground trains, the tube doesn’t allow access to the internet, leaving many passengers with nothing to look at except ads.

London poster print company Ro-Am Posters says that the essence of a great poster campaign lies in ‘communicating to audiences through eye-catching visuals and succinctly presented information’. A bigger advert doesn’t need you to include more information, in fact less can be more striking and will grab the attention of passengers.

As with any advertorial campaign, budget plays a huge part in where you can advertise. But with locations large and small, along with equal access to passengers, there are varied locations and poster sizes to suit your campaign.

Use Tube Car Panels to advertise brand launches & offers

Tube Car Panels, the inner carriage posters that are located just above head height, offer an extended amount of time to attract the attention of passengers.

While platform waiting times average at 3 minutes on the platform, a passenger’s journey will be anywhere from a couple of minutes to almost an hour. Averaging around 13 minutes, this is more time that can be spent reading your poster.

Underground poster campaigns can fit a range of higher and lower business budgets, taking into account number of adverts, sizes and duration of your campaign. For feature or brand launches, tube car panels are an easy and effective way of getting your message to passengers.

Include calls to action, website/social media details and a succinct tagline to get your point across without making the viewer feel like their having to work too hard. Pact Coffee, for example, have recently started advertising on the tube car panels, keeping their advert message clear using their “first bag for £1 with code” offer, branding logo, colours and few other cluttering details.

Billboard style adverts for bold posters on big budgets

Some of the most memorable ads on the tube were effective and artistically interesting because of their simplicity. Big billboard style posters adverts, ranging from the 48 sheet size to Media Walls – in premium locations.

Eye catching, bold prints and splash style poster adverts are a great way to make a lasting impact on passengers. Rather than looking to convey large amount of text information, these billboard adverts suit a statement poster and typically come from bigger budget businesses.

A good example of this is the Apple iPhone 5c poster campaign which used bright, pastel colours to create contrast over a single image of the phone and the name ‘iPhone 5C’ side by side. Of course simplicity isn’t everything, so avoid a tag line that could end up backfiring, such as Sony’s headphones ad that describes what headphones do.

Get specific with location based poster adverts

Targeting for your underground advertising doesn’t just mean considering the layout of your visuals or choosing between platform and carriage. If you have a shopfront or are looking to target a particular audience market, you should consider picking certain tube lines or even stations for your posters.

This is done frequently on both the larger and smaller scale, with restaurants and bars targeting lines such as the Bakerloo and Northern lines, or around Waterloo and Victoria stations due to their frequent use by commuters and tourists alike.

Don’t underestimate the importance of doing research into both the area surrounding your adverts target audience, where they frequently travel to and from, while engaging posters. This will help ensure you have effective, targeted advertising for your underground print campaigns.

Cover photo credit: Piccadilly Circus underground station / Flickr