Wheatpaste Poster Sizes for Mexico City Campaigns

A4 is the base ISO format and the most widely printed sheet in Mexico—but it is rarely the primary format for outdoor wheatpaste campaigns. Its role in the street is supplementary. A4 works for small-volume local announcements: bar and venue interior posting, handout supplements to a larger street campaign, neighborhood tianguis distribution, and sticker-scale activations in tight corridors.

On the street, A4 disappears quickly in the visual environment of a CDMX wall. You will not build brand awareness from A4 outdoor placement alone. The format’s value is in quantity and saturation—reaching eye level inside a venue, on a pole, or as a handout that reinforces the outdoor format. Supplement an A1 or 70×100 cm run with an A4 density sweep through the same neighborhood and you extend coverage into spaces the larger formats cannot reach.

A3 sits between the handout world of A4 and the outdoor-viable threshold of A2. In CDMX, A3 is used as a secondary street format for bar and venue corridor posting, construction fence snipe work, and campus posting near UNAM and Instituto Politécnico Nacional. It is a reliable density-run format on shorter wall runs where the economics of A1 do not make sense for a limited local campaign.

A3 reads well at close range—sidewalk level, inside a corridor, or on a construction board at chest height. It does not compete with A1 or 70 × 100 cm for visual authority on an open wall. Use A3 to add depth to a campaign: place A1 on the major wall runs and sweep A3 through the side streets, venue corridors, and stairwell posts in the same zone. The combined footprint reads as full saturation without the cost of A1 volume for every surface.

A2 is the threshold where CDMX outdoor wheatpaste starts to work. It holds on a wall visually—it has enough surface area to carry a headline, an image, and a call to action at a distance of three to five metres. Premium snipe executions, elevated wall positions visible from pedestrian medians like Álvaro Obregón and Tamaulipas, and selective placement campaigns all run A2 effectively.

A2 is useful for campaigns that need visual presence in a neighborhood without committing to the volume and logistics of a full A1 run. A gallery opening in Roma Norte, a product launch test in Condesa, a DJ residency announcement in Juarez—these are scenarios where A2 hits the right balance of size and quantity. The format carries more visual weight than A3 while remaining easy to handle in the field. One person can carry, paste, and place A2 sheets efficiently. Two sheets of A2 tiled vertically approximate A1 coverage on a wall without the structural requirements of a larger paste.

A1 is the standard street poster format across Mexico. Every gráfica in CDMX runs A1. It is the music industry baseline format—concerts, album releases, streaming platform launches, tour announcements, and label campaigns all run on A1. The format works on virtually every wall in the Roma Norte, Condesa, Juarez, and Polanco placement inventory.

When an international brand enters the Mexico City market through wheatpaste, A1 is almost always the starting point. The format is familiar to CDMX audiences—they read it at street level, at the right distance, in the right proportions. Wall inventory across the city is configured around A1: the standard horizontal-run wall holds a row of A1 sheets with minimal waste on either side. Print houses stock A1 substrate as their primary run size, which keeps unit costs lower than any other outdoor-viable format.

A1 does not disappear on a wall. It holds enough surface area to carry strong visual creative—a portrait, a product shot, a typographic layout—without requiring the campaign to go to a larger format to be legible. For most campaigns entering CDMX for the first time, A1 is where you start. Add 70 × 100 cm to the same run on select high-visibility walls for added authority without replacing the A1 volume.

The 70 × 100 cm format is Mexico’s primary premium street format. Automotive campaigns, telecom launches, major retail activations, and entertainment releases that need to read from across a four-lane avenue run 70 × 100 cm. This is the format that commands the highest-value wall inventory in Polanco, Santa Fe, and along the major corridor walls on Insurgentes, Reforma, and Patriotismo.

The size difference from A1 is immediately legible to a CDMX audience. A 70 × 100 cm sheet placed next to a row of A1 reads as higher priority—the campaign that paid for better walls. That visual hierarchy matters in dense posting environments where multiple campaigns compete for attention on the same surface. When your campaign needs to sit above the ambient street noise, 70 × 100 cm is the format that does that job in CDMX.

Print runs for 70 × 100 cm are slightly more expensive per unit than A1 due to substrate and press configuration, but the cost delta is smaller than most clients expect. For campaigns where the creative demands visual scale—a car, a face, a landscape—the upgrade from A1 to 70 × 100 cm on select high-visibility placements is one of the sharpest decisions you can make before a campaign goes to print.

The 66 × 96 cm format is the web-offset press standard for mass-volume runs in Mexico. Carnival promoters, mass-event advertisers, political campaigns, and any campaign that needs 500 or more sheets across multiple alcaldías runs on 66 × 96 cm. The format exists because of press economics—web-offset presses in CDMX are configured to this sheet size, which means high-volume runs at this specification cost significantly less per unit than equivalent digital or sheetfed offset runs.

At street level, the size difference between 66 × 96 cm and 70 × 100 cm is invisible. Audiences do not notice 40 mm in width or 40 mm in height when a poster is pasted on a wall at street level. What they notice is the campaign—the creative, the placement density, the visual presence. If your campaign needs to hit 20 neighborhoods simultaneously and volume is the primary variable, 66 × 96 cm from a web-offset house is the format that makes the economics work without sacrificing any visible street impact.

A0 is a large-format statement piece. Automotive brand launches, telecom campaigns, major retail openings, and fashion season activations that need to own a wall run A0. The format works on taller Porfirian-era building facades in Roma Norte and Polanco—the high plaster and masonry walls that have enough vertical height to hold an A0 sheet without the bottom third cutting into doorframe height.

A0 requires a two-person installation crew. The sheet surface area is large enough that wind during installation becomes a genuine field hazard—a single-person crew risks tearing or misaligning a sheet mid-paste. Early-morning installation windows (before 7 am) are standard for A0 in CDMX to take advantage of lower wind speeds and reduced pedestrian traffic that would otherwise interrupt the paste window.

The best application for A0 is 10 to 30 strategic high-visibility placements—not mass runs. You identify the highest-impact walls in your target neighborhoods, place A0 sheets on those surfaces, and let the scale of the format carry the campaign. Combined with an A1 density run across the same zone, the A0 placements become the anchor points that the A1 volume radiates out from.

The 90 × 120 cm format is the standard construction hoarding size across CDMX. Scaffolding panels around building renovations in Roma Norte, Condesa, and Polanco are typically configured to this sheet size. Mercado entrances—the large covered markets in Cuauhtémoc and Benito Juárez boroughs—use panels and hoardings in the 90 × 120 cm range as the natural partition between the market exterior and the street.

The format offers excellent visibility from across a wide street or open plaza. In a neighborhood where a new apartment building or commercial development is going up, 90 × 120 cm panels placed on the hoarding become the dominant visual presence at that block for months. The continuous construction cycle in Cuauhtémoc and Benito Juárez boroughs makes this a consistent inventory source. One renovation project can provide months of 90 × 120 cm hoarding exposure at a single address.

Creative for 90 × 120 cm should account for the format’s near-square proportions. A 3:4 aspect ratio—wider than A1 or 70 × 100 cm—means horizontal layouts work better than vertical ones. Campaign designs built for A1 often require cropping or recomposing to fill the 90 × 120 cm frame effectively. Plan the format into your creative brief from the start if you intend to use construction hoarding inventory.

The 120 × 160 cm format is the ultra-large building-face format in CDMX. Film release campaigns, luxury brand launches, automotive debuts, and entertainment properties that need to own a wall—not just post on it—run 120 × 160 cm. The format reads from a full block away in normal CDMX street conditions. At 47 inches wide and 63 inches tall, it occupies more surface than any other standard wheatpaste format in the Mexican market.

Large-format digital printing for 120 × 160 cm requires specialized equipment. Not every print house in CDMX stocks the substrate width needed to print a single-sheet 120 × 160 cm. Tiled production—multiple sheets printed and aligned on the wall—is the standard approach for campaigns that cannot access single-sheet wide-format output. The paste window for tiled 120 × 160 cm is extended: two-to-three people, proper alignment marking before paste, and adequate drying time between sheets are all non-negotiable for clean installation.

Placement inventory for 120 × 160 cm is limited by definition. The format requires a blank wall with enough uninterrupted vertical and horizontal surface to hold the sheet without architectural interruptions—no doorways, windows, electrical boxes, or corner breaks within the paste zone. The best inventory in CDMX for this format is in Cuauhtémoc, on major construction panel installations in Santa Fe, and on building-face campaigns in Polanco where the right blank facades exist at ground level.