Every Tube advertising format compared

Fifteen formats are buyable on the London Underground, and they do genuinely different jobs. This is the full comparison — cost, creative specification, where each one sits and how long the audience spends with it.

Start with the job, not the format

The table above compares everything on the same terms, which makes it useful for checking a specification and misleading as a shortlist: nobody buys a format because it is cheapest per panel. The more productive question is what you need the site to do — hold a long message, be seen from across a platform, carry several executions, or cover a district cheaply. Group the formats that way and the list gets short quickly.

Formats by job

• —Sequential storytelling — escalator panels, digital or static. Forty-five to ninety seconds, one story told in frames.
• —Impact at scale — 48-sheet and 96-sheet posters, digital gateways. Seen once, seen large.
• —The platform wait — cross-track 16-sheets and digital 12-sheets, read across the track for the full wait.
• —Local coverage — 6-sheets and digital 6-sheets, bought station by station or as a pack.
• —Long copy — Tube car panels, read in carriage across the length of the journey.
• —Everything at once — a station domination, one advertiser holding every site in the station.

The units are not the same, so the prices are not comparable

The single most common misreading of a Tube plan is treating the rates above as like-for-like. They are not quoted against the same thing. Posters and digital 6-sheets are priced per panel. Escalator panels and station dominations are priced per station. Tube car panels are priced per panel but sold in packs of hundreds. A number that looks cheap in one column can be the most expensive line on the plan once the unit is applied.

Three formats also carry a minimum booking, which sets a floor under the entry price regardless of how few sites you actually want: 550 Tube car panels, ten escalator panels, five four-sheet posters. Multiply the rate by the minimum before comparing anything.

How long you have to buy it for

Two weeks is the standard unit across the network and the period every rate on this site is quoted against. Some formats are comfortable shorter or longer than others, and the typical duration column in the table above is a better guide to how a format is normally traded than to what is theoretically possible. Where a campaign needs an unusual length, it is a question for the availability check rather than an assumption to plan around.

Creative specifications

Sizes are not interchangeable between formats, and within a pack the sites can differ. Confirm the specification for each site before artwork goes into production, and supply to the copy deadline rather than the on-air date so there is room for a clearance amend. Each format page carries its own creative size and production notes, and the copy clearance guide covers what gets rejected.