Phantom Blog

May 2022

Viewing posts from May , 2022

There’s a Tiger on the prowl. Watch out!

Tigers!

Tigers with lasers!

Tigers are cool. Tiger Crystal Ultra Low Carb is also extremely cool, especially when you crack one straight from the fridge.

A brand like this deserves a thrilling poster campaign, so Phantom Billstickers worked with DB and Dentsu to deliver one.

It’s up now at our prime Symonds Street site in Auckland.

It involves lasers.

Create a sensation with a laser activation

We’ve installed lasers to help Tiger’s powerful creative shine even brighter in the city night. It’s our first ever laser activation campaign, and it’s hard to miss.

Our lasers are there to light up the Tiger brand and draw attention to their posters at night. Check out the light show on Symonds Street if you’re curious.

And let us know if you’d like something equally ferocious to grab your customers’ attention.

Being ‘net carbon zero certified’ is a good place to start

Last year we put up our hands to be audited by Toitū Envirocare.

The results are now in. Phantom Billstickers is officially ‘net carbon zero certified.’

Now, this doesn’t mean our operations have been decarbonised – far from it. It simply means we’ve submitted every aspect of our business to independent scrutiny and then taken concrete steps to offset emissions. For example, our carbon emissions identified in the Toitū audit have been offset against the Amayo Phase II wind power project in Nicaragua.

Going forward, we’ll continue to offset our emissions against other International Fairtrade Gold Standard projects approved by Toitū.

The time for greenwashing is over

When Phantom started out 40 years ago, the street poster industry was pretty much organic by default. Cheap paper, printers’ ink and flour-and-water glue were our key inputs.

Times have changed. There are transport emissions, solvents, paper usage and a tonne of organisational inputs to be calculated. It’s hard to measure their extent, let alone their impact. So we turned to the experts. 

Enter Toitū.

They ruthlessly analysed every aspect of our operations, right down to requesting logs of all our Uber rides. The result is a carbon audit with a high degree of scientific certainty. This will inform our strategies while we use their science-based tools to drive emissions down, year on year.

You can check Phantom’s carbon emissions on Toitū – it’s a matter of public record. Hold us to account as we move towards our ultimate goal of being carbon positive over the coming months and years.

And hold the rest of the OOH sector to account, too. 

Want to find out more about Phantom’s net carbon zero journey? Check out the programme we’ve signed up for. Or give us a call.

40 years with glue in our hair

source: canterburystories.nz/collections/archives/music-posters

Phantom started sticking posters to walls way back in 1982.

That’s an awful lot of gluey buckets, flyaway paper and 4am starts.

It’s been one helluva ride. So what have we learned along the way – and what’s in it for property owners and managers?

Lesson 1: Make the business a win/win proposition

Back in the early 80s, the poster business operated under Wild West conditions. Councils, landlords and the law barely tolerated our efforts. Rival crews spent half the night covering the posters others had pasted up earlier.

This was not a sustainable business model.

At Phantom, we could see a much better way of operating. It involved making sure all the stakeholders had something to gain.

Property owners could gain revenue.

Advertisers could benefit from a higher level of quality and accountability.

Municipal authorities could gain an attractive and well-regulated streetscape. 

So we started paying property owners for the space on their walls, giving them a brand-new revenue stream. Phantom then took responsibility for maintaining their sites, providing frames, cleaning up after taggers, and even installing upgrades such as lighting.

At the same time, we needed to persuade Councils to stop treating posters as an affront to civic tidiness. So we worked with them to modernise bylaws and create legally permitted street poster sites. This was the key to turning sterile and depressing streetscapes into a constantly-changing display of creativity.

It may sound obvious now but it was a big deal at the time. No one else was offering to pay property owners and doing the hard yards with municipal rule-makers.

In fact, Phantom Billstickers has been a global pioneer in transforming street posters into a reputable arm of the marketing business. 

Even today, few countries can boast a poster network with the nationwide scale, professionalism and quality of ours.

Lesson 2: Don’t rest on your laurels

Sticking a message on a wall may be one of the world’s oldest forms of advertising. 

But we realised we needed to keep evolving.

Clients weren’t going to commit serious money unless they could be sure their posters would look great. So Phantom partnered with suppliers to ensure our posters were beautifully printed and wrinkle-free – and didn’t fall off the wall in New Zealand’s rainy climate.

Advertisers and media planners also needed certainty. They wouldn’t commit to street posters unless we could prove their brand campaigns had appeared in the frames they’d booked, for the entire period they were paying for. 

Our response was a unique app, called Pasted, It captures every Phantom poster when it goes up and sends time-stamped, photographic proof to the client.

Phantom has also created some smart planning tools that give marketers the ability to target sites near their key stockists, so they can drive sales from people who are on a mission to shop.

It’s about adding value to poster sites – and making sure those marketing budgets continue to reach our site owners.

Lesson 3: Never lose your connection with the street

You’ve seen how the street poster business has changed out of sight over four decades.

But it’s just as important to remember that the fundamentals have never changed.

Phantom got into this business to help support the creative arts in this country. Selling tickets for bands, promoting music, providing a space for artists and anyone else with a vision they want to place before the public.

It’s a business but it’s also a passion. And the great thing is – it’s sustainable. 

By providing certainty for our partners, we can continue to fund ‘flora for the concrete jungle.’ It all starts on the street.

So what’s next?

2022 is our 40th birthday so we have some celebrations in the works

A book is being published. There will be festivities. And giveaways.

We’d like to share the good times with you, so keep an eye on your inbox and make sure you follow our socials.

Phantom on Instagram.

Phantom’s Facebook page.