KRIS MEYER
Blog Author
With a sharp eye for strategy and market positioning, Kris has helped numerous businesses turn their vision into lasting brand identities.
Marketing Campaigns
Street marketing lives or dies on one thing: will people stop, notice, and share it? These campaigns earned that attention, and each one offers a lesson for businesses planning their own street-level push. New to the format? Start with our Street Marketing 101 guide.
1. Domino's "clean sidewalk" logos (2009)
To promote its American Legends pizzas, Domino's had 220 logos "blasted" onto sidewalks overnight in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York City, using a high-pressure water sprayer to clean the design into the dirt. The clever extra step: the first 250 people to email a photo of themselves with one of the logos won a gift card. The lesson: give people a reason to photograph and share the mark, and the campaign travels well beyond the footpath it's on.
2. Green Works and the San Francisco tunnel mural (2009)
To launch a plant-based cleaning product, agency DDB worked with reverse-graffiti pioneer Paul "Moose" Curtis to clean a 140-foot mural of local plant life into the grime at the entrance to San Francisco's Broadway Tunnel. Over a year later it was still visible to more than 20,000 people passing each day. The lesson: when the medium is the message, a cleaning brand proving its product by cleaning the ad into existence, the idea sells itself.
3. Alexandre Orion's São Paulo tunnel (2006)
Before brands caught on, artist Alexandre Orion cleaned a huge mural into the soot of a São Paulo tunnel, reportedly around 1,000 feet long, and the city later washed it off. It was art rather than advertising, but it inspired the format that marketers now use. The lesson: public surfaces belong to someone, so check permissions before you place a mark. It's one reason we build our campaigns around pigment that fades on its own.
4. Global brands testing the format
Smirnoff, Puma, ING Bank, Mini Cooper and Nissan have all used clean-advertising formats over the years. Moose himself has said the best work isn't in your face. Amid the noise of eye-level city advertising, something a little intriguing draws people in. The lesson: a simple, curious mark often beats a loud one.
5. Small businesses using the format for local launches
Not every viral moment needs a global brand behind it. Local store openings, pop-ups and class launches have used stencil marketing on nearby footpaths to drive walk-in traffic — proof that the same principles (simple design, high-traffic placement, built-in shareability) scale down just as well as they scale up.
A note on method
Most of the campaigns above cleaned their designs into dirty surfaces. Wash Away works the other way around: we supply water-soluble pigment and custom stencils, so the design is applied to the surface and fades naturally with rain over a couple of days. The visual principle is the same, and so is the appeal: bold, temporary and easy to leave no trace. The common thread Every campaign above was simple, well placed and photogenic. That's the brief we bring to every kit we produce: a design bold enough to stop foot traffic and clean enough to photograph well, wherever your customers are walking. Not sure whether it suits your business? Try our 5-question self-check. Want your brand's own street moment? Talk to us about your campaign. Sources: QSR Magazine on the Domino's campaign, Ads of the World: Green Works "Reverse graffiti", Basa Studio: "The clean art craze".
Blog Insights
Creative Blog Stories
Street Marketing 101
That's the appeal of street marketing a broad category of out-of-home advertising that meets people where they already are, on foot, at street level, in the middle of their day. Unlike traditional billboards or print ads, street marketing works because it's unexpected. It doesn't ask for attention; it earns it.
Is Street Marketing Right for Your Brand?
Street marketing isn't the right fit for every campaign. It works best when a business needs sharp, local, short-term visibility — not when it needs broad, long-running brand awareness. Here's a quick way to tell if it's worth adding to your plan.
