Poster hangers Andrew Moore and Luke Rowlands. Photo / Greg Bowker
Poster hangers Andrew Moore and Luke Rowlands. Photo / Greg Bowker
Dawn is quieter in the city now the bars and clubs have to close at 4am. But one guy is doing his best to bring the noise, bellowing out in search of a cigarette lighter as he totters down Queen St past the Civic.
He seems to have misplaced his shoes in the course of the evening.
Across the road, a few metres from Kebabs on Queen, are the remains of a kebab that clearly wasn't with the customer long before exiting. All around, the city is stretching and yawning in the early light.
Andrew Moore and Pete Johnson don't pay much attention. They have posters to put up.
Street postering was once one of the rites of passage of being in a band: the late-night run, finding unclaimed walls, dodging police, security guards and, often as not, other poster crews likely to paste up over yours — all to let your peers know you were playing a gig.
The two men are toiling at the long, white wall that screens off the stalled St James redevelopment. It's one of the newest sites for Phantom Billstickers, the company that has done more than any other to expand postering from its rock 'n' roll roots.
Phantom's thousand-odd poster positions in Auckland are not unclaimed walls but contracted spaces, formalised with wooden picture frames ranging in size from A3 to 4.6sq m "supers". Site owners are paid anything from $50 a month to tens of thousands a year.
Every Thursday, a computerised system allocates the week's posters and on Fridays they're bathed in glue and sorted into trays. Just before dawn on Saturdays and Sundays, two-man crews head out in GPS-equipped vans, with a smartphone app to tell them what goes where and capture pictures of the finished work.
And the work is about a lot more than rock 'n' roll.
The St James site has a donated "super" advertising a benefit gig for Beastwars singer Matt Hyde's cancer treatment, flanked by Harry Styles and Incubus.
But further up, posters for Bjork's new album have to come down for a Ceres Organics campaign and a new Civil Defence poster.
The colourful Ceres posters come with peel-off stickers and the Civil Defence one has a hotspot that interacts with mobile phones.
Apart from size — a council bylaw stipulates anything over 5sq m is not a poster but a billboard — the key difference between posters and billboards is that we're closer to posters. Close enough to touch.
"Postering seems to have a bit more humanity to it," says Phantom's managing partner Jamey Holloway.
"It's less the power speaking from on high. A bit less the Eye of Sauron."
Holloway has been with Phantom since 1998, when he found himself in Christchurch with a fresh first-class Honours degree in English and a new baby.
Figuring he heeded a job, he went to see Jim Wilson. Wilson has been in and out of the local music scene for decades. He was the Exponents' first manager and Flying Nun Records founder Roger Shepherd credits him with creating the Christchurch live music scene that fostered the first wave of groups on the label.
Now, he was back to something he had been doing since the 1960s — putting up posters. Phantom, the company he formed in 1982, sold in 1985 and bought back in 1992, was the big noise in street postering in the city.
"But Jim could kind of see that the world was changing," says Holloway.
"There had been this anarchy with street postering. We made fine money, but ultimately the client's resources were being wasted on papier mache — people postering over each other. And good sites would appear and then disappear because none of the stakeholders were being looked after.
"The council's concerns weren't being taken into account and the people who actually owned the wall had no say over whether they had posters on it.
"So what we started doing was finding out who owned the wall and signing a contract with them and paying them some of the money being made off their property."
He moved to Auckland in 2014 after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake wrecked his home and the company's office ("we ran the business from my mother in-law's kitchen in Rangiora for a while") and manages the business day-to-day, with Wilson providing the strategic vision.
Although its turnover — somewhere between $8 million and $10m a year — constitutes only 2 per cent of overall outdoor advertising, Phantom dominates postering, with about 90 per cent of the national market.
Andrew Moore and Luke Rowlands in central auckland. Photo / Greg Bowker
"We're giant minnows," quips Holloway.
Phantom's growth has not come without conflict — and that's a sensitive issue. Both Holloway and Wilson (in a series of Facebook messages) bring up, unprompted, a 2016 essay on The Spinoff in which writer Maria McMillan lamented the way Phantom's council ordained "monopoly" in Wellington had "stolen the walls" from her and her feminist punk peers. There was quite a backlash.
"The essay conflated the whole history of postering in Wellington into a few characters," says Holloway.
"We've been in Wellington since 2004 but we were getting online aggro for things that happened in 1981."
A year later, the same website published a column by poet Kirsten Warner lauding Phantom's support for writers via its "poster poets" series (since 2009, more than 200 New Zealand poems have featured on large A0 posters around New Zealand and even in Japan and the US, and Phantom sponsors National Poetry Day) and the free Phantom Cafe Reader, the country's best-read literary magazine.
Between them, the two Spinoff posts span perceptions of the company.
Phantom entered Wellington in 2004, buying the postering business of the late Shihad manager Gerald Dwyer from Dwyer's mother, then reaching its agreement with the council, which duly stopped paying security firms to remove posters.
It arrived in Auckland the same year, to compete with Bill Fitzgerald's Profile Plus, an old-school operation that battled in the new environment.
Fitzgerald spurned offers of a buyout from Phantom and eventually sold his postering business to a new company, Shout Media, founded by Paul Kenny, a veteran of the billboard-and-bus-advertising company iSite.
Shout adopted Phantom's site contracting model and snared a key Phantom employee.
Fitzgerald kept his smaller business in retail — distributing small posters and handbills to shops and cafes who'll have them — where he continues to compete with Phantom.
The rivalry is real and occasionally personal, but the way the postering business works now is settled.
Andrew Moore at work on a Saturday morning. Photo / Greg Bowker
But is the new paradigm squeezing out kids who want to put up posters for their gigs?
"That's a fair question, but I don't think so," says Holloway.
"There's tons of space out there and tons of wild postering that we didn't do. I have respect for people who don't have money but have time and energy and go out there and cane it.
"We try and look after them by letting them have a certain number of posters for free. We have some of the best spaces in the country contracted out solely for arts events and we can hook bands up. But there are still bands doing their own posters on Queen St and Cuba St."
Other clients, including the Labour and Green Parties, have used Phantom's reach among younger citizens. A giant poster image of Jacinda Ardern still beams down on the yard of Phantom's central Auckland premises.
But arts-sector postering makes up 60 per cent of Phantom's work by volume — and only 30 per cent of its revenue. Its commitment to the arts is, says Holloway, "more than artswashing".
Holloway is also a musician and a member of Auckland band The New Existentialists.
Others among his 60-strong staff, including illustrator Luke Rowlands and director Andrew Moore, who is making a documentary about the notorious band King Loser, have creative arts connections.
But there's still some tension around the edges. I leave the Queen St crew and head to Karangahape Rd, where a team is working the company's small sites on shopfront columns, pasting music gig posters. They're under instructions to remove wild posters from "our sites".
Phantom has paid shopkeepers to put frames on the front of the columns — but does it also own the sides? There's some grumbling about that in the indie music scene.
"It's only on properties where we're paying rent and we're supposed to be taking care of it," responds Holloway later.
Whatever the rights and wrongs, it does seem informal space on Auckland's least formal street is being squeezed. Independent posters are now being pasted up wherever there's room — even on the back of street signs.
But it's also a more formal city, and one where, as online space expands to the point of becoming valueless, real, physical space is becoming more contested and more precious.
Perhaps it's symbolic that on Phantom's watch, street postering has moved out of the darkness and into the light. But not quite the daylight: just the dawn.
