Human billboard
person who applies an advertisement on themselves
A human billboard is someone who displays an advertisement on their person. Most commonly, this means holding or wearing a sign of some sort, but also may include wearing advertising as clothing or in extreme cases, having advertising tattooed on the body. Sign holders are known as human directionals in the advertising industry, or colloquially as sign walkers, sign wavers, sign spinners, sign twirlers or (in British territories) sandwich men. Frequently, they will spin/sway or dance or wear costumes with the promotional sign in order to attract attention.
History
Human billboards have been used for centuries. In the 19th century London, the practice began when advertising posters became subject to a tax and competition for wall space became fierce. Prince Pückler-Muskau described the activity in 1820s London as such:
Formerly people were content to paste advertisements up; now they are ambulant. One man had a pasteboard hat, three times as high as other hats, on which is written in great letters, "Boots at twelve shillings a pair—warranted".
Furthermore, besides holding signs, some human billboards would wear sandwich boards. Charles Dickens described these advertisers as "a piece of human flesh between two slices of paste board".
“Human billboard” enters the record as person who applies an advertisement on themselves. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Human, billboard and person can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q979753. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Human billboard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.