How to Brief a City Takeover Wheatpaste Campaign: Brand Guide

Every problem in a city takeover campaign execution traces back to the brief. The wrong format goes to print because the brief didn’t specify one. The documentation arrives in the wrong format because no one asked for a specific standard. The wall list includes neighborhoods the brand never wanted because the target audience wasn’t defined clearly enough. The installation happens three days late because the artwork wasn’t available on the date assumed.

The brief is the document that determines whether the campaign runs smoothly or spends its entire production window resolving problems that should have been addressed on paper. American Guerrilla Marketing has been receiving and acting on city takeover campaign briefs for over a decade, across every major US media market and dozens of international cities. We know exactly what a good brief contains, what a bad brief costs, and how the information in a brief gets translated into actual execution on the ground.

This is the complete guide to writing a city takeover wheatpaste campaign brief from the brand side.

What Every Brief Needs to Contain

A city takeover campaign brief has ten essential components. Not nine, not seven. Miss any of these and you’ve introduced a gap that will get filled by someone else’s assumption at exactly the wrong moment.

1. Campaign Objective

What is this campaign trying to accomplish? The three most common objectives are awareness, launch amplification, and event drive. They look different in execution:

• Awareness — Broad geographic coverage, high impression volume, wall selection optimized for maximum daily foot traffic. Neighborhoods selected for density, not audience specificity.
• Launch amplification — Concentrated presence timed to a specific release date or launch moment, with installation 7-14 days prior. Wall selection prioritized for the neighborhoods where your target audience is most active. Documentation optimized for social content sourcing.
• Event drive — Installation timed 7-10 days before an event, with wall selection prioritized for proximity to the venue and corridors that event attendees are likely to travel. Documentation should show venue-adjacent placement clearly.

State the objective explicitly. “We want brand awareness” and “we’re launching a product at retail” are different campaigns with different wall selection logic, different timing, and different documentation needs.

2. Target Audience

Demographics alone aren’t enough. “18-34 urban consumers” describes half the pedestrian traffic on most streets in Williamsburg. What you need to tell us is: where does your target audience physically spend time, and what does their daily geography look like?

The most useful target audience information for a city takeover brief:

• Specific neighborhoods where they live, work, or spend leisure time
• Cultural context (music genres, brands they buy, subcultures they’re part of)
• Transit behavior (commuters vs. pedestrians, vehicle-dependent vs. walkable market)
• Relevant adjacent events or venues (art galleries, music venues, skate spots, independent retail)

This information drives wall selection more directly than any other brief element. We’re placing posters in front of the people who need to see them. Knowing where those people walk is the foundation of a smart placement strategy.

3. Primary Cities and Target Neighborhoods

Specify cities. Within those cities, specify neighborhoods if you have preferences — but if you don’t know the local neighborhoods, say so and let us recommend. Don’t pull neighborhoods from Google Maps without on-the-ground knowledge of whether those neighborhoods are appropriate for your audience and objective. We’ve seen briefs that named neighborhoods because they sounded right to someone in a conference room. The Meat Packing District in New York is not the same cultural context as the Lower East Side. Both are Manhattan. Very different walls.

If you don’t know the market, say: “Target demographic is [X], objective is [Y], preferred cities are [Z]. Recommend neighborhoods.” We’ll build the placement map and bring it back for approval before anything moves to production.

4. Format Requirements — or Ask for a Recommendation

In the US, standard wheatpaste formats are 24×36 inch single-sheet (the baseline), 24×36 double-stacked (two sheets creating a vertical unit), and larger multi-sheet formats for high-impact placements. Depending on your artwork and objective, different formats serve different purposes.

If you have an existing artwork size, state it. If you’re flexible, note that you’re open to format recommendations — we’ll select the format that best serves the objective and the available wall inventory in your target market.

One firm rule: do not finalize print production before confirming format specifications with your operator. Printing 200 copies of an artwork that doesn’t fit the walls you’re targeting is a real problem we’ve seen more than once.

5. Timeline

The timeline section needs three specific dates:

• Artwork availability date: When will print-ready files be ready for production?
• Desired installation date: When do you want the campaign to go up?
• Campaign duration: How many days should the campaign run?

For a standard US city takeover, we need 2-3 weeks between the brief submission and installation. For international markets or multi-city activations, 4-6 weeks. If you’re running against a tight timeline, tell us immediately — we can often compress the window, but we need to know the constraint upfront.

6. Documentation Standard

Specify exactly what you need. The bare minimum is GPS-tagged photographs with timestamps for every installed wall. But minimum isn’t always what you need:

• If you need documentation for media agency accounting, specify that GPS coordinate data needs to be exportable in a structured format (CSV, spreadsheet).
• If you want street photography that works as social content, note it — it changes how field crews frame their shots.
• If you need documentation within 24 hours rather than the standard 48, state that upfront.
• If you’re delivering a media accounting report to a client and need a specific format or naming convention for the files, include that in the brief.

Documentation standard should be agreed in the brief, not after installation. We cannot retroactively add GPS metadata to documentation that wasn’t captured that way in the field.

7. Budget Parameters

Provide a range. Not an exact number, and not “TBD.” A range gives us enough information to scope the right campaign — the right number of walls, the right format, the right city count. Without any budget parameter, we’re guessing at scale. The first campaign proposal we send back will be wrong for your budget in one direction or the other, and we’ll waste time rescoping.

8. Special Requirements

This is where you capture everything that doesn’t fit neatly into the other categories:

• No competitors nearby (specify the competitor brand or category)
• Proximity to a specific venue or address required
• Social media photography angles requested
• Specific no-fly zones (neighborhoods or addresses to avoid)
• Legal requirements around placement authorization
• Brand safety parameters (no placement near explicit content, adult venues, etc.)

Special requirements that come in after the campaign is already in production create real operational problems. State them in the brief.

What a Poorly Written Brief Looks Like

The poorly written brief creates problems at every stage. Here’s what it typically looks like and why it fails:

“We want a city takeover in New York. Our budget is flexible. We want good walls in cool neighborhoods. The campaign is for our new product launch, which is happening soon. Please advise.”

This brief tells us almost nothing useful. “Flexible budget” means we don’t know whether to plan for 50 walls or 500. “Cool neighborhoods” is not a placement brief — every operator has a different definition of that. “Happening soon” is not a timeline. “New product launch” without an objective means we don’t know what success looks like.

The problems this brief creates downstream:

• We present a campaign proposal that’s either over or under budget because we had no range to work from
• We select neighborhoods based on our judgment of what’s “cool” rather than where the target audience lives
• Production timeline can’t be confirmed because we don’t know when artwork will be ready or when the launch is happening
• Documentation standard isn’t agreed, so the client receives whatever we deliver by default

A brief this vague doesn’t get better in production. It gets worse. Every missing element becomes a decision point that someone has to resolve under time pressure, often incorrectly.

The Brief Template

Here is a working template for a city takeover wheatpaste campaign brief:

How the Brief Changes by Campaign Type

Music Release Campaign

Music release briefs are calendar-locked. The release date is fixed, and everything works backward from it. Installation should happen 7-14 days before release — not day-of. The pre-release window is when organic social anticipation is highest. Day-of posters are already competing with the news cycle of the release itself.

Key brief elements for music release campaigns:

• Release date (hard deadline, non-negotiable)
• Artist name and whether the artist’s name appears on the creative (it affects how field crews handle documentation-as-social-content opportunities)
• Target neighborhoods — music release campaigns benefit from highly specific placement in the neighborhoods where the artist’s audience actually lives. A hip-hop release campaign in New York belongs in different zones than an indie rock release campaign, even if both are city takeovers.
• Organic social intent — if the goal is organic amplification, note it explicitly. It shapes wall selection toward the areas most likely to generate foot traffic photography.

Product Launch Campaign

Product launch briefs are often more flexible on timing than music briefs but more specific on proximity. If the launch includes a retail component, walls should be concentrated within walking distance of key retail locations. If the launch is a standalone brand moment, the placement logic shifts to neighborhood density and audience specificity.

Product launch briefs also tend to have tighter documentation requirements — marketing teams presenting campaign performance to executives want clean, clear, format-consistent proof-of-posting that reads well in a presentation deck.

Retail Opening Campaign

Retail opening briefs are the most geography-specific of the three. Everything about wall selection is driven by proximity: the opening address, the surrounding walksheds, the transit corridors that bring foot traffic to the block. A retail opening in Wicker Park in Chicago has a different geographic logic than one in Silver Lake in Los Angeles — different street grid, different transit options, different pedestrian flow.

Brief a retail opening by specifying the opening address, the radius within which you want wall coverage, the opening date, and the foot traffic corridors you most want to hit. We build the placement map from there.

How to Brief an International Campaign vs. a Domestic One

International campaigns require the same core brief elements plus additional layers. The format section becomes critical: different countries use different standard poster sizes. The US runs 24×36 inch; the UK uses A1 (594x841mm) and B1 (707x1000mm); France uses A1 and A0; Japan uses JIS B1 (728x1030mm). If you’re briefing a campaign that runs across multiple countries, the brief needs to specify either that you’re providing market-specific artwork in each format, or that you want format recommendations and are willing to produce local-market files.

International briefs also need to address:

• Language localization: Does the campaign run in English in all markets, or does creative get localized per market?
• Local operator coordination: American Guerrilla Marketing coordinates certified local operators in international markets. Your brief should specify whether you expect a single point of contact (us) managing all markets, or whether you have existing local operator relationships to integrate.
• Production lead time: International production timelines are longer. A domestic brief needs 2-3 weeks. An international brief needs 4-6 weeks minimum, and more for markets where local print production is the constraint.
• Documentation format: GPS metadata formatting differs between countries. Specify if documentation needs to be consistent in format across all markets for audit purposes.

Common Brand-Side Brief Mistakes

Over-Specifying Walls from Satellite Images

This is the most common mistake from brand teams that have done some research. Someone pulls up Google Maps or Google Street View, finds a wall that looks right, and includes the address in the brief. The problem: satellite images are often months or years out of date. The wall might be painted over, covered by another campaign, structurally changed, or simply unavailable for the reasons only firsthand, on-the-ground knowledge would reveal. Provide neighborhoods and objectives. Let operators select the actual walls.

Under-Specifying Documentation Requirements

We hear this more often than any other post-campaign complaint: “We needed the photos in a specific format for our agency and no one told us.” Documentation requirements established after installation is complete cannot be met retroactively. State exactly what you need, in what format, delivered by when, in the brief — before execution begins.

Leaving Format Decision Too Late

Artwork goes to print without confirmed format specs, and then we find out the files are the wrong dimensions. Or worse: the files are the right dimensions but wrong for the walls that were confirmed for the campaign. Format confirmation needs to happen before print production. The brief is where you lock in this sequence.

Setting Budget as “Open” or “TBD”

There is no such thing as an open budget for a city takeover. Every campaign operates within parameters. When brands don’t share budget range, the first proposal we build will be wrong. Provide a range — even a wide one — so we can scope appropriately the first time.

The Single Question That Makes Every Campaign Brief Better

Before you submit a brief, answer this question: What does success look like on the day after installation?

This question cuts through the ambiguity that makes briefs fail. If success on day one looks like 200 GPS-tagged documentation photos delivered to your agency by 9am, your brief needs to specify documentation standard, delivery window, and file format. If success looks like three organic Instagram posts from people who walked past the campaign in Williamsburg, your brief needs to prioritize high-foot-traffic walls and social-photography-optimized documentation. If success looks like an executive presentation showing the brand’s presence in four markets, your brief needs to specify markets, neighborhoods, and presentation-quality documentation.

The answer to that question backward-engineers the brief. Every element of the brief — objective, target audience, format, documentation standard — should serve the answer to that question.

What AGM Does With Your Brief

When a brief comes in, here’s what happens on our end:

Brief review and gap identification. We read the brief against our checklist of required elements. Any gaps get flagged immediately in a return brief review: missing information is called out with specific questions, not assumed. We will not proceed with a campaign proposal if critical information is missing.

Placement map development. The brief’s target audience and geographic parameters get mapped against our wall inventory in the target markets. We prioritize walls by foot traffic relevance, format suitability, and neighborhood alignment with the objective. The output is a specific wall list with neighborhood assignments, quantities by location, and a format recommendation.

Production specification. Based on the confirmed format and quantity, we build the production specification: print specs, delivery timeline, quality standards. This is the document that goes to the production partner.

Crew assignment. Our certified field operators are assigned by territory. Each crew gets a defined zone, a wall list for their zone, and the documentation protocol for the campaign.

Documentation protocol. Based on the documentation requirements in the brief, we set up the workflow: GPS tagging active, timestamp format confirmed, delivery window locked, output format agreed.

Client approval gate. Before anything goes to production, we send the placement map back to the client for review and approval. This is the point where brands can request changes to the wall list, neighborhood priorities, or format. After approval, the campaign moves to production. Changes requested after this point may affect timeline and cost.

The Brief Is the Foundation

Every operational decision in a city takeover campaign — what walls, what format, which crews, what documentation, what timeline — flows from the brief. A well-written brief creates a campaign that runs cleanly, delivers exactly what the brand needs, and generates data that makes the next campaign better. A poorly written brief creates a campaign that spends its production window resolving questions that should have been answered on page one.

American Guerrilla Marketing is happy to help brands new to city takeover campaigns develop their first brief. We’ll walk through each section, ask the right questions, and help you define the objective, audience, and documentation standard clearly before execution begins. That upfront investment of time is the best guarantee of a campaign that delivers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the minimum information needed to brief a city takeover wheatpaste campaign?

The minimum viable brief includes: campaign objective, primary city and target neighborhoods, timeline (artwork availability date and desired installation date), campaign duration, and documentation format required. Everything else — format, quantity, specific walls — can be recommended by AGM based on those inputs.

How far in advance should a city takeover campaign brief be submitted?

For a standard US city takeover, we recommend briefing at least 2-3 weeks before the desired installation date. This allows time for wall confirmation, production, and logistics coordination. For international campaigns or multi-market activations, 4-6 weeks is the standard lead time. Tighter timelines are sometimes possible — tell us the constraint and we’ll confirm.

What is the biggest mistake brands make when briefing a city takeover campaign?

Over-specifying walls from satellite images without on-the-ground knowledge of current surface conditions or availability. Brands pull addresses from Google Maps and include them as required locations. Most of those walls won’t be available or appropriate. Trust certified operators to select the right walls. Provide neighborhoods and objectives, not addresses.

Does AGM require artwork at the time of briefing?

No. We recommend briefing before artwork is finalized so we can confirm format specifications before production begins. Sending final artwork to print in the wrong dimensions is a common and costly mistake. Brief early, confirm specs, then finalize production.

What is the single question that improves every city takeover campaign brief?

What does success look like on the day after installation? This forces clarity on whether the goal is organic social amplification, media accounting documentation, market presence for a specific launch, or awareness saturation in a specific neighborhood. The answer backward-engineers every element of the brief.