Hand-painted mural advertising turns a blank wall into a piece of a city's daily life. It's one of the most effective outdoor advertising formats for building long-term brand presence, because a mural doesn't behave like a standard ad: nobody scrolls past it, and once it's up, it keeps working without any extra media spend. Phantom's Custom Shop team has been producing mural advertising and hand-painted advertising (HPA) campaigns across New Zealand since 1982, working with a network of artists across the country.
A mural commands the entire wall it occupies. On a high-traffic site like Karangahape Road, which has become a recurring canvas for some of Phantom's biggest Custom Shop work, it becomes the most visible thing on the street.
Phantom's highest-traffic Super sites deliver tens of thousands of views a day, and a mural on one of them gets seen by the same commuters repeatedly and by new people every day it's up. There's no algorithm deciding who sees it and no pay-per-impression cost. The wall does the work for everyone who moves through that space.
No two hand-painted murals are the same. Each one is built for a specific brand, wall, and audience, from scratch.
In June, Auckland artist Matt Griffin spent seven days hand-painting a Supergirl mural on Rose Road, Ponsonby, for Universal Pictures, produced through Custom Shop. Jason Momoa turned up partway through and signed the wall himself. Read the full story: it's a moment a printed poster simply can't manufacture.
Custom Shop's artist network covers a wide range of styles and disciplines, including Christchurch's JacobYikes, who paints under a practice that moves between city walls and gallery shows.
A well-placed mural doesn't read as advertising. Over the duration of the campaign, it becomes a landmark locals walk past daily and visitors stop to photograph.
When Mac's Brewery launched its Ginger Giant campaign, Custom Shop built a mural on K Road to introduce the character to the city, then paired it with a street poster rollout across the same neighbourhood so the campaign worked at more than one scale at once. K Road has carried some of Phantom's most ambitious murals for exactly this reason: it's one of the most-walked streets in the country, and work placed there becomes part of how people experience the street itself.
The same holds in Christchurch, where a post-earthquake wave of street art turned empty walls into part of the city's identity. Phantom supports that scene through backing Flare Festival, Ōtautahi's mural festival run with Watch This Space, which has featured JacobYikes' record-breaking mural work.
Someone photographs a mural, posts it, and the campaign reaches an audience well past the street it was painted on. That's measurable, not just a nice idea.
When American shave brand Harry's worked with artist Kevin Lyons on a hand-painted mural in New York, the campaign's recap video pulled significant return through a QR code, as reported by The Drum. The tied-in product collection sold out completely. Read more about the HPA format from a previous Phantom article here.
The Supergirl mural on Rose Road picked up its own share of earned coverage, with Stoppress and M+AD Daily both covering the Jason Momoa signing within days of the mural going up.
A mural doesn't disappear the way a digital ad does when the budget runs out. The Supergirl mural on Rose Road ran for four weeks, and hand-painted work in general isn't tied to the same site-rotation schedule as a standard street poster campaign, so a mural can often stay live well beyond a typical booking.
Every person who walks past the wall after the campaign's official end date is still seeing the brand, without any extra spend to keep it working.
Hand-painted murals aren't locked to one look or size. Custom Shop's artist network spans styles from raw and street-level to polished and considered, matched to whatever the brief calls for.
Christchurch's JacobYikes is one example: his recent piece for Flare Festival became the tallest mural in Aotearoa. His work also appears on Phantom bollards from Wellington to Christchurch, moving between street walls and gallery shows in the same practice. Read the full interview.
Murals work best as the anchor of something bigger, not the whole campaign. On the Ginger Giant campaign for Mac's Brewery, Custom Shop paired the K Road mural with a large-scale street poster rollout, so the campaign reached people who saw the wall and people who only saw the posters elsewhere in the city. Max A0 street posters and flyer distribution both work well as the second and third layer around a mural, carrying detail, a QR code, a date, an offer, that a wall isn't built to hold.
Phantom Billstickers has been putting campaigns on the streets of Aotearoa since 1982. We have more than 6,500 council-approved sites from Whangarei to Invercargill and formats ranging from A3 through to Super. Whatever the duration, we have the network and the expertise to make your campaign work.
Street level. High impact. Built to last.
Get in touch with Phantom to start planning your campaign.
Hand-painted mural advertising, also called HPA or hand painted advertising, is a large-format outdoor advertising campaign painted directly onto a wall by an artist, rather than printed and installed as a poster. Phantom's Custom Shop team produces hand-painted mural advertising campaigns across New Zealand.
Pricing depends on the wall, the artist, the scale, and how long the mural needs to stay up. Custom Shop quotes on request for every mural advertising brief. Request a quote to get pricing for your campaign.
We have select Hand-Painted Advertising sites in Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Wellington and Christchurch. These sites are chosen for visibility to both foot traffic and vehicles, in the kinds of spots people actually move through. Tell us where you want to reach people and we'll put together a recommendation.
Phantom's Custom Shop works with a network of mural and hand-painted advertising artists across New Zealand, including in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. Get in touch to talk through your brief.