Beyond Europe: what it takes to run street marketing globally

A campaign in a country you’ve never worked in usually comes with hesitation. Street marketing doesn’t travel the same way everywhere. What counts as wild posting in one city is a permit violation in another. A budget that stretches in Amsterdam won’t stretch the same way in Seoul. None of that is knowledge you can bring with you. It has to be learned in the place itself.

That’s really the story here. Not a list of cities we’ve worked in, but how we got comfortable working in them. It started in Amsterdam, then grew into Stadsbehang and Paper Trails Europe as the work spread across the continent. 

At some point, campaigns started landing outside Europe too. Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Cape Town, Melbourne. We used to be Paper Trails Europe. Now we’re the Paper Trails Agency. Though we’ll admit, expanding the business turned out to be easier than renaming our own web domain. Two of the newest stops on that broader map are New York and Istanbul, each one requiring the same thing every other city has: figuring out how it actually works before we show up.

How local research shapes an international street marketing campaign

The work looks different depending on the format. For projections, most of it comes down to scouting locations that will actually hold up, practically, before anyone commits to a plan. For other formats, it’s more about understanding the local rules well enough to work within them.

Tokyo taught us that early on. What looks like wild posting there is technically authorised posting with a guerrilla look to it, and that distinction changes how a campaign gets planned from the very start.

Istanbul is probably our clearest example of what this actually takes. The SC Freiburg campaign was booked, scouted, and planned in about a week, all before anyone from the team set foot in the city. 

The only piece that couldn’t be handled remotely was the projection equipment, we needed rental battery packs on the ground, and finding a supplier under that kind of time pressure isn’t easy in a city you don’t know. It came together because one of our interns is Turkish and picked up the phone to local suppliers herself, in Turkish, and had it sorted within a day. 

It helped that our Amsterdam team happens to be so international: Dutch, Polish, Vietnamese, Swiss, and others. Every so often that means someone can just make the call themselves. It’s not something we’d want to rely on for every campaign, moving that fast in an unfamiliar market takes extra coordination and usually costs more, but when the timeline calls for it, it shows what the team can pull off.

What global street marketing has looked like for us

PGA Tour’s work has taken us to a mural in Cape Town, graffiti in Seoul, and wild posting in Tokyo. RAINS ran wild projections in Seoul. Charles & Keith took wild posting to Melbourne. 

Crocs worked wild posting in Hong Kong, and FILA did the same in Seoul. Different cities, different formats, but the same thing behind all of them: understanding the place well enough to know what will actually work there.

A team that grows with the map

None of this works without the right people. Every new market adds its own layer of things to learn, and that only holds up if the team behind it keeps growing too. As we’ve taken on more countries, the team has grown right along with it, which is part of why a new market feels like a realistic next step rather than a leap into the unknown.

We didn’t set out to prove we could work in six or seven countries outside Europe. We set out to get better at the part that actually makes it possible, knowing a place well enough to move in it with confidence. The name changed because the work already had.

Want to bring street marketing somewhere new? Let’s talk.