Grand Theft Auto VI's marketing takeover has officially crossed the Atlantic. A massive building-side ad for the game is going up along the Paris périphérique, the city's busy ring road and some are already calling it the biggest physical GTA 6 ad deployed anywhere so far.
The initial sighting report comes from Rockstar Mag, a French-language site that covers Rockstar's games, which posted on October 6 that a giant advertisement was spotted by one of their Discord members in the middle of installation on a building in Seine-Saint-Denis, the department northeast of central Paris known as the 93, near Porte de Bagnolet. The spot sits by the périphérique around the Mercuriales towers, where it faces the heavy traffic that rings the city. Photos and video of the installation in progress were later shared by several other people independently, further confirming that the ad itself is real and going up.
Rockstar Mag estimates the wrap at 175 meters and described it as the biggest GTA 6 ad deployed so far.
GTA 6's biggest real-world ads so far
City | The activation |
|---|---|
Paris | A building wrap on the périphérique, fans claim 175m, unverified |
Miami | The "Welcome to Vice City" rooftop sign on the Kaseya Center |
Miami | An approved downtown banner plan at a reported $202,000 per banner |
Brooklyn | A Jason and Lucia mural at the same corner used for GTA V in 2013 |
LA, NY, Miami | Spotify billboards carrying GTA 6 artwork |
Tokyo | Sony "It Happens on PS5" billboards featuring GTA 6 |
The physical campaign now stretches across the US, Japan and France.
Until this week, the biggest physical promotions for the next Grand Theft Auto had clustered itself in the US and Japan. Miami, specifically, has been the center of it all, which makes sense since the fictional Vice City is based on it. The so-called Gateway to the Americas recently unveiled the near-million-dollar "Welcome to Vice City" rooftop sign on the Kaseya Center to an approved plan for downtown building wraps at around $202,000 a banner, among others. Spotify also put GTA 6 artwork on billboards in Los Angeles, New York and Miami and Sony ran GTA 6 billboards in Tokyo under its "It Happens on PS5" banner. A huge ad on the Paris ring road pushes that map into Europe in a serious way for the first time.
With the game out on November 19, Rockstar and its partners are blanketing major markets in the final weeks. A site as visible as the périphérique is exactly the kind of high-traffic canvas these campaigns chase. It also rhymes with what is happening back in New York, where a Jason and Lucia mural is going up on the same Williamsburg corner that most recently hosted a Grand Theft Auto V mural in 2013 ahead of its initial launch on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as part of an ongoing franchise tradition dating all the way back to 2004 with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Whether it truly measures 175 meters or ends up the single largest GTA 6 ad in the world is the part still waiting on proof. Either way, the takeover that started in Miami is now in Paris too.
Soon enough, we should hear reports of similar marketing takeovers in other parts of the globe.