Notes for owners · Branding and communication
How to design metro and transit advertising
A commuter stands still in front of a platform panel for four minutes and passes the same one twice a day for a month. Design for the sixth viewing.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
Transit is the one outdoor medium where the audience stands still. A commuter waits three or four minutes on a platform with nothing to look at, sits in a train for twenty minutes, and passes the same pillar twice a day for a month. So the three-second rule that governs a hoarding is the wrong rule here. The real constraints are the distance each surface is read from, and the fact that the same person will see your panel thirty times before the cycle ends.
Every surface is a different reading distance
A station buy is sold as a package, and each item in it needs its own artwork.
Platform and concourse panels are read from two to five metres by somebody with time. This is where detail belongs: a price, an opening date, a map, a QR. A five-word line here is a wasted panel.
Escalator panels are read in sequence at a fixed speed, in one direction. They can carry a sentence across several frames, and the order flips depending on whether the escalator is going up or down. Get the direction from the agency before you lay them out, or the joke lands backwards for half the riders.
Grab handles and hanging panels inside the train are read at arm's length by a standing passenger holding a phone in the other hand. One idea, very few words, no small print.
Panels above the seats face a seated passenger with twenty minutes and nothing to do. The best of them behave like a page rather than a poster. Put the important part in the top third, because the bottom third is blocked by the heads and shoulders of the people standing.
The station facade and the viaduct pillars face the road, not the commuter. That is an outdoor buy wearing a metro badge, and it should be designed as a hoarding.
Design for the sixth viewing
A hoarding on Hosur Road is seen once by most people who see it. A panel at a residential station is seen by the same four thousand people every working day for the whole cycle.
That changes what works. A clever line gets old by day four. A picture of the thing you sell, with the name and the location, does not. Detail rewards repetition, because the reader who ignored it on Monday reads the price on Thursday.
It also means the second creative is not a luxury on a long booking. Same layout, same colours, a different offer or a different product, changed at the halfway point. Commuters notice the change, which is the only new attention you can buy without paying for another panel.
Say where you are from where they are standing
This is the thing metro creative does better than any other medium, and most panels waste it. The reader is at a known point on a map. So write the address from that point.
Two hundred metres from Exit B. Second floor of the building opposite the ticket gates. Three stops from here, one minute from the east entrance. That is more useful than a full postal address and it is the reason you paid for this station rather than the network.
For example, a coaching centre near a station in west Bengaluru gets more from a panel on that station's platform that names the exit than from the same money spread over four stations on the line.
What the printer and the authority need
| Thing to fix before artwork | Why |
|---|---|
| The exact panel size, and whether it wraps a curve or a corner | A face or a logo on a pillar wrap distorts, and seams fall where the panel bends |
| The viewing distance for that panel | Decides type size and resolution, not the printer's default |
| The material the system permits | Underground and platform-level material is specified by the authority, including how it behaves in a fire |
| The approval route and how long it takes | Approval comes before printing, and a late file shortens the cycle instead of delaying it |
| Wording restrictions on that property | Some systems restrict claims, competing categories and anything that mimics station signage |
| The mounting date and the working window | Work happens after the last train, so material has to be at the station the evening before |
Never let artwork mimic the station's own signage, its colours or its arrows. The authority will reject it, and a rider who feels tricked is not a buyer.
Screens in the station are a different brief
The digital panels in a concourse run a loop. You own a few seconds of it, with no sound, in front of people who are walking, so the rules change again.
Animate slowly. A cut every half second reads as noise at walking pace and cannot be finished by somebody who joined the loop late. One message per frame, two frames at most, and the name on screen for the whole of your slot rather than as a sign-off at the end.
Ask two things before booking: how long the loop is and how many spots you have in it, and whether you get a playout report. Without those, you own an unknown share of a screen.
The mistakes that repeat
A brochure enlarged, with four paragraphs of body copy on a platform panel that people read while watching for the train. A phone number as the only way to respond. Everybody standing there is already holding a phone. Artwork approved on a laptop and never printed at size, so the type that looked confident at A4 disappears at three metres. And a package bought as a number of panels, where nobody asked which entrance each one faces.
Ask for a photograph of every mounted panel in its position, taken from where a commuter stands. Read the offer off the photograph. If you cannot, it is not mounted where you thought.
What to do next
Pick the station your buyers live near, not the interchange with the biggest footfall, and write the panel for somebody standing eight feet away with four minutes to spare. Put the detail back in. Then plan the second creative for week six before the first one goes up.
If you are being shown a package of twenty panels across a line and cannot tell which ones matter, that is a media question as much as a design one, and it is the kind of thing we take apart in the free audit.