Bus advertising turns a city's transit fleet into moving media, plus the street-level shelter network that serves it. Here's the format vocabulary and how buying actually works.

Unless you buy a full wrap, you're sharing the vehicle: one advertiser may hold the kings while another holds the front and rear. That's the main cost difference between a wrap and a panel buy, and it's why local budgets typically land on panels while national campaigns take wraps.

Interior cards ride above the windows facing seated passengers: long dwell, repeated daily exposure to commuters; among the cheapest OOH impressions available.

Shelter posters and digital stop screens are street-furniture placements at fixed locations along routes; they're bought like fixed inventory (specific locations) rather than fleet media, and pair naturally with fleet buys.

Not route by route, but geography is genuinely controllable through depots. Larger markets run multiple bus depots, and each depot services a defined set of routes in its region. If you need to reach a particular part of a city, the media owner can propose the depot covering it: to target the north side of Atlanta, for example, there's a specific depot whose buses service those routes. Buses circulate out of their depot and return on those routes across your flight, so they stay in that region even though you can't specify individual lines. New York and Atlanta are the clearest examples of depot-level targeting. Ask for the depot and route map with any package.

Fleet media sells in unit counts (number of kings, number of rears) per 4-week period, often bundled into market packages rather than priced per panel; wraps price individually, and interior cards sell in bulk runs. Because packaging differs by transit system, bus buys are quoted per campaign. Listed bus inventory is also a subset of what's bookable: when you're ready to buy, your campaign triggers an RFP to the relevant transit concessionaires along with live availability checks, and packages are built for your specific markets and routes. Name the markets you want rather than working from listings alone.

Bus generally runs on forced production, meaning the transit operator produces the creative rather than routing it through AdQuick's print partners. You supply approved artwork to spec and the operator handles printing and installation. Plan an extra week or two beyond a street-level buy, since transit authority creative approval sits on top of production time, and give wraps the most runway of any bus format.

Most transit operators provide a GPS report covering the routes their vehicles ran during your flight, so fleet delivery is verifiable rather than assumed.