KEITH MCARTHUR
MARKETING REPORTER, TORONTO

Air Canada posters screaming "It's a revolution" fight for space among ads for dance clubs, theatres and indie bands on a boarded-up auto shop in downtown Toronto.

Long the domain of alternative advertisers, the technique known as "wild posting" is gaining traction among mass marketers from Molson to Nike as they look for innovative and cost-effective ways to reach consumers.

"Large national advertisers that used to concentrate their dollars in television are suddenly questioning that strategy," said Caroline Gagnon, vice-president and media director at Marketel/McCann-Erickson Ltée. It was Ms. Gagnon's firm that recommended wild posting to Air Canada.

"There's more consciousness and more willingness to try different approaches," she added.
The client embraced the technique because it fit with Air Canada's sales pitch that its new multitrip passes represent a revolution.

"The message is that there's a revolution in air travel and truly we felt that wild posting was a medium that helped us communicate the message," Ms. Gagnon said.

Marketel hired Grassroots Advertising Inc., a Toronto company that has teams in 11 Canadian cities who plaster construction hoardings with posters.

Is it legal? That depends. Each municipality has its own rules about where companies can put up posters, how big they can be and what kinds of tape and glue are permitted.

Canada's largest city is governed by seven different sets of regulations that predate Toronto's 1997 amalgamation. City council is looking at adopting a single set of standards for the city.

"Council has espoused some concerns about postering as a source of litter. They're trying to balance that against the concerns that are raised with respect to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and those issues," said Frank Weinstock, manager of policy and business planning for the city.

Other municipalities take a tougher stand and even threaten to impose fines, according to Jeff Wills, a partner at Wills & Co. Media Strategies Inc., which has orchestrated several wild posting campaigns for Virgin Mobile.

"Vancouver and Montreal are the two big fining cities where they threaten to fine. And we've certainly had those threats. But . . . you get around that if you go around and scrape them off, which we've had to do," Mr. Wills said.

Most major marketers stick to wild postings on construction hoardings that -- while technically illegal in some cities -- are usually tolerated. But Virgin Mobile didn't want to constrain itself to construction sites in its wild posting campaigns in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

"For Virgin Mobile, we're trying to get to where young people are and I don't see the correlation necessarily between construction sites and young people," Mr. Wills said. He hired what he describes as an "illegal street team" that put Virgin posters everywhere from newspaper boxes to parking meters in trendy youth areas such as Toronto's Queen Street West.

Despite pushing the boundaries, Virgin has only received two serious complaints -- one about posters that were put up at the construction site for the new Toronto opera house and one about a poster that was put up on a brick wall at Ryerson University.

Mr. Wills predicted that marketers will continue to push the boundaries for wild posting.
"Just watch, because there will be more and more of this stuff getting out there in ways you've never imagined before, in places you've never thought people would post before, too," he said.
"Don't be surprised if you start seeing stuff on subways and buses."