Outdoor advertising in Moscow

A month on the rate card starts at RUB 15,000, and a typical address lands around RUB 45,000. The price sits on the card next to the exact address where the owner has published one.

A quote is built from your list of addresses and dates, with volume taken into account; we confirm availability with the owners of the structures, and we check the artwork before it goes to print.

Advertising faces in the catalogue: 33,707. Addresses under them: 13,119. Owners: 17. Every face carries an exact address, plus a photo and a rate-card price where the owner has published them.

In Moscow the format that may stand at an address depends on where it sits relative to the ring roads and the radial arterials.

Formats in the catalogue: 9, and Citylights holds the most faces — 20,486 of them. What decides which format is possible at an address is not the operator but the placement zone: the city rules tie structure types to zones (decree No. 712-PP, edition of 12 December 2017).

• 6 × 3 m billboards, city boards, superboards and supersites, rooftop and one-off structures: only from the Third Ring Road out to the city limits, on the MKAD ring motorway and along the radial arterials beyond that ring.
• Those arterials are named one by one — Kutuzovsky and Leningradsky avenues, Prospekt Mira, Leninsky Prospekt, the Yaroslavskoye, Kashirskoye, Varshavskoye and Volokolamskoye highways among them.
• Any other type is barred inside a zone: a format not listed for it cannot stand there even where a site is free.

Catalogue addresses are spread over parts of the city, and those parts number 131. The city itself is split into 12 administrative okrugs, created by the Mayor of Moscow, and an okrug boundary never cuts across a raion boundary (Charter of the City of Moscow, articles 15-17). They are Central, Northern, North-Eastern, Eastern, South-Eastern, Southern, South-Western, Western, North-Western, Zelenograd, Novomoskovsky and Troitsky.

The unit matters here. Two of the okrugs, Novomoskovsky and Troitsky, are made of settlements rather than raions, and the intra-city municipalities are a different division again, with a count of their own.

Digital surfaces: 3,715 of 33,707. Take a screen when the creative and the schedule have to change mid-campaign — for events, sales or times of day; a printed board carries one creative for the whole term.

A media facade in Moscow is not a kind of screen but a regime of its own: it is allowed only in accordance with the register of media facade locations, a separate city document listing addresses and minimum permitted dimensions. The rules also restrict changing the image during daylight hours.

Yes. Several of these places are named in the city advertising rules one by one, because the placement regime there is a special one:

• the buffer zones of the Moscow Kremlin, the Novodevichy Convent and the Kolomenskoye estate museum;
• the Central Park of Culture and Leisure, given a sub-zone of its own;
• the Boulevard Ring, from Gogolevsky to Rozhdestvensky boulevard;
• Tverskaya and 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya, the square by the Kiyevsky railway station, Novy Arbat and Arbatskaya square, Bolshaya Yakimanka, Prospekt Akademika Sakharova, and the Presnenskaya embankment in Moscow City.

The first restriction is the zoning itself: a structure type belongs to a zone, and "placing advertising structures of any other type in those zones is not permitted" (clause 4.3.3 of the rules). In order of severity:

• in the buffer zones of the Kremlin, the Novodevichy Convent and Kolomenskoye the only outdoor advertising allowed at all is unlit playbill stands for theatres;
• on protected natural areas and around heritage sites placement is possible only if the historic urban environment is preserved, and with the city heritage department signing off;
• the Boulevard Ring, everything inside the Garden Ring and the Tverskaya zone take small format only.

The rules were approved by decree No. 712-PP; the norms above are quoted from the edition of 12 December 2017. We reconcile a central address against them while building the shortlist, before it reaches your quote.

The site is fixed by the advertising placement scheme, and the city media and advertising department approves it — but only once other agencies have signed off:

• the cultural heritage department, for heritage sites and their buffer zones;
• the architecture and urban planning committee;
• the transport department, inside transport interchange hubs and within 15 metres of stations and stops;
• the joint administrative and technical inspectorate;
• the Federal Guard Service, for motorcade routes and the places where people under state protection are present.

That last approval is why a central address can be technically suitable and still never appear in the scheme. The schemes themselves are declared open and subject to mandatory publication.