Outdoor advertising in Almaty

Advertising faces in the catalogue: 500. Addresses under them: 492. Owners: 2. Every face carries an exact address, plus a photo and a rate-card price where the owner has published them.

Formats in the catalogue: 3, and Cityboards holds the most faces: 496. The city names its free-standing formats itself and fixes their area — akimat decree No. 2/341 of 13 June 2023:

• cityboard — 6 to 8 m²;
• city-format panel — no more than 2.2 m²;
• mediaboard — 10 to 12 m².

The same rules require internal lighting and impact-resistant glazing, and a marking on the structure itself: the owner's business or individual identification number and the number of the advertising site, a QR code being allowed.

Digital surfaces in the catalogue: 166 of 500. Take a screen when the artwork and the schedule have to change mid-campaign — for events and sales; take a printed face when one creative for the whole term matters more.

The city distinguishes them explicitly: akimat decree No. 2/341 names the mediaboard among the formats that carry advertising as video, and caps the luminance of outdoor advertising at 500 cd/m². In the city fee schedule video images have lines of their own, where the rate rises with area.

No permit is issued here: a notice goes to the akimat no less than five working days before the placement date, under the rules approved by maslikhat decision No. 23 of 19 February 2021. Three documents go with it:

• a form stating the period and the site;
• proof of payment for the first month;
• a description of the advertisement in Kazakh and Russian, with sketches.

If the akimat stays silent for four working days, the placement may go ahead on the dates declared; comments have to be answered. Placement without a notice is not allowed, and the national charge for it is doubled. The bilingual artwork is needed when the notice is filed, not afterwards: the Kazakh text goes on the left or on top and the Russian on the right or below, in letters of the same size. We look at the artwork before it goes to print.

The limits come in two layers: the maslikhat placement rules (decision No. 23 of 19 February 2021) close off places, and the akimat technical rules set the geometry.

• Advertising is not allowed on monuments of history and culture or within their protection zones, on places of worship and the land assigned to them, inside specially protected natural areas, or on pavements and cycle lanes.
• On street furniture — kiosks, benches, bins, bus shelters — advertising is possible only where the furniture was installed by the akimat or by an investor that won an open tender.
• A free-standing structure may not stand closer than 25 m to a bus stop in the direction of travel, 20 m to a pedestrian crossing marking, 3 m to trees or 50 m to the nearest other structure — that last figure caps how densely addresses can sit.
• Inside the zone of increased density of advertising objects, drawn on a map annexed to those rules, only street furniture and structures of up to five square metres are allowed.