Outdoor advertising in Chicago: what runs, who sells it, and what the rules allow

Chicago out-of-home is roadside bulletins and digital from Clear Channel Outdoor, OUTFRONT and Lamar; CTA buses and trains sold by Intersection under Ordinance 026-42; Metra sold by OUTFRONT; JCDecaux shelters; and screens on cars and trucks. AdQuick lists a static bulletin at $2,500 to $15,000 per four weeks, read September 14, 2026.

Chicago is the market where the rules push inventory away from the places advertisers want most. The zoning ordinance keeps new off-premise signs 500 feet from the expressways, Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue between Oak Street and Roosevelt Road, and the transit authority's advertising policy was rewritten and re-passed in April 2026. This page is the Chicago row of the site's format and market matrix opened up: the 17 placements below are photographs from the 170 Chicago frames in the campaign archive, the owners table was read off each company's own Chicago page, and every figure carries the publisher and the date it was read. It is written for advertisers and media buyers, and it is not a rate card.

What has actually run in Chicago?

The archive holds 170 frames from Chicago covering 46 brands, photographed between 2022 and 2025. Three things stand out in it. The city's convention calendar shows up on the roofs: AbbVie and AstraZeneca's Lynparza at McCormick Place during ASCO, Siemens Healthineers' trucks during ADLM. The CTA is in the background of the street-level frames as often as the skyline is, which is the audience overlap a planner should notice. And Chicago is the only one of the four markets in this series with hologram frames in the archive, ten of them, one of which is below.

Digital screens on car roofs

Wrapped cars, with and without a screen on top

LED trucks and a hologram unit

Among the frames rejected from this page after being opened: a truck the manifest files under "lollapalooza" is a Warner Bros. film truck outside Nordstrom on Michigan Avenue, so its brand field is wrong, and an in-car screen filed under Chicago shows a Las Vegas weather header on the tablet. The manifest is a starting point, not a caption.

Who sells outdoor advertising in Chicago?

Seven different sellers, and the split matters more than the names. The roadside plant is shared by three national companies. Transit is two concessions with two content policies, because the CTA and Metra are different authorities. The shelter the bus stops at belongs to a fourth contract. Every row below was read on the seller's own page or the authority's page on September 14, 2026; where a number appears, it is the seller's own claim, dated as the seller dates it.

The Metra line is the one national planners miss. OUTFRONT's Chicago page lists "Metra Transit media" among its formats and calls the commuter rail "the nation's fourth largest/busiest system"; Clear Channel Outdoor's page separately claims the "500 W. Madison" and "2N Riverside" positions beside Ogilvie Transportation Center. Two companies are selling the same commuters at the same station from different assets, one from the platform and one from the building across the street. Neither is the CTA. The general pattern, who holds each concession in each city and why bus and shelter are usually two contracts, is on bus advertising and subway advertising.

What do Chicago's rules allow?

Three documents decide most of it, and all three were read in full for this page. The CTA policy is the most detailed content standard of any authority in this series: it counts alcohol wraps. The zoning ordinance is about geography. The municipal code is about who signs off.

Read the alcohol clause against the owners table. An alcohol brand can buy a Clear Channel bulletin on the Kennedy without a count, but on the CTA it competes for one of 75 exterior bus wraps and 30 rail car pairs at any one time, and it cannot post at all at a station where reduced-fare student ridership exceeds 7.5%. The ordinance also states the CTA's own scale, "over 950,000 rides on an average weekday on eight rail lines and 127 bus routes", which is a ridership figure and not an audience figure; the difference is the subject of how out-of-home impressions are measured.

On vehicles: we read Municipal Code 9-80-080, which restricts parking a vehicle on a roadway to display it for sale or to sell merchandise, and found no Chicago section specific to advertising vehicles in the chapters we read. That is a statement about what we read, not a clearance. The national table of which regulator governs each moving format is on transit advertising.

What do third parties publish on Chicago rates?

The ranges below are market-level figures compiled from publicly published vendor and industry sources. They are not quotes, and they are not the rates of any single network, including the operator whose campaigns the archive on this site documents, which prices per campaign and does not publish a rate card. Always get a written quote before budgeting.

The publishers disagree with each other and, in one case, with themselves. AdQuick's city table gives a Chicago static bulletin a $2,500 floor; its Chicago page gives an expressway bulletin a $4,500 floor and a premium unit a $30,000 ceiling, twice the ceiling on its own table. Blue Line Media's bulletin ceiling is $7,500, less than half of AdQuick's. business.com's tier puts Chicago in the same band as New York and Los Angeles. None of the four states a sample or a method. Treat them as four published opinions about the same market, and note that the two with the highest ceilings are the two that name the Kennedy and Dan Ryan, the corridors the zoning ordinance keeps new signs out of.

How is delivery counted in Chicago?

Fixed inventory is rated by Geopath, whose impression is "the total number of times people passing an OOH display are likely to notice the ad", built from circulation and a visibility adjustment. Clear Channel Outdoor cites "Geopath OOH Ratings" beneath its Chicago claims; OUTFRONT cites "GEOPATH, 2022" for its reach figure. A screen on a car or a truck is not a rated unit in that system: it moves, so delivery depends on the route, the dwell time and the hour, and the arithmetic changes. Both methods, and what each can and cannot show, are on how out-of-home impressions are measured.

This is Chicago's row of the format and market matrix, derived from the archive:

Reflects campaigns documented in this archive; absence is not evidence of unavailability. Counts are photographs, not campaigns or units, and a frame tagged with two surfaces is counted under each. The twelve food-truck frames are one sampling campaign and were not used above because the truck itself is not legible in them.

The whole matrix, all markets and all formats, is on the campaign archive. The category argument, why a screen that follows an audience behaves differently from one that waits for it, is on the guide to out-of-home advertising. A market is published on this site only when it clears four checks: at least twelve documented frames photographed in it, the transit authority's own advertising standards read live, at least two named third-party rate sources read live, and a real row in the matrix above. Chicago clears all four.