If you can build it, someone will wrap an advertisement around it.

First cars, then buses, buildings and commuter trains. Now even gasoline tanker trucks come with wraps, including some from a surprising advertiser: the L.A. Opera.

“The people who drive every day are customers of theirs,” said Joey Klein, president of Media-N-Motion, the Los Angeles advertising company that handled the opera’s tanker-truck wraps. “It’s a new medium, so it feels more cutting-edge, not what everybody else does.”

The trend started several years ago when advertising agencies gave outdoor advertising another chance, according to Jessica Yarmey, director of Research & Marketing at the Outdoor Advertising Association of America in Washington.

Like most media phenomena, the wrap craze is most prevalent in New York and Los Angeles, but Yarmey said it’s spreading. The strip in Las Vegas has become a hotspot for message-bearing trucks that simply drive back-and-forth all day.

In Los Angeles County, the Metropolitan Transit Authority signed a deal in August with CBS Outdoor that will allow wraps on subway trains. CBS already handled full and half-wraps on MTA’s buses.

According to MTA spokesman Rick Jager, bus advertising will contribute an estimated $20 million to the agency’s budget in fiscal year 2008. About $2 million of that total will come from bus wraps. MTA also will get $2 million from train advertising, Jager said, with the new wrap program too new to generate any revenues yet.

The city’s building boom has provided

advertisers with larger structures to wrap. Last year Motorola wrapped a 20-story tower on Sunset to promote its new mobile phone. The covering protected the public from particulates due to asbestos removal, part of an apartment conversion project. Later, SkyTag, a local wrap company, turned the tower into a gigantic ad for the movie “Transformers.”

To cover the tanker trucks, Klein uses a self-adhesive vinyl that can last a year or longer. However, the typical wrap campaign runs only three to six months. “Usually the life of the vinyl is longer than the life of the promotion,” he said.

For the L.A. Opera campaign, the trucks have routes within Los Angeles County. They all start from Carson, where they load up with gasoline, but disperse to visit gas stations throughout the county. The tanker campaign currently touts an image from Don Giovanni, the Opera’s production that opens Nov. 24.

“It has been very successful in the sense that people have commented about it,” said Gary Murphy, director of communications at the Los Angeles Opera. “All of us are in our cars so much here in L.A. We got quite a bit of response from people saying things like, ‘I was driving down the 5 and there was Don Giovanni next to me!’ ”

Surface streets provide the best context for vehicle wraps, according to Yarmey. “This product makes sense in high-traffic, high-congestion areas,” she explained. “Once you get off Sunset Boulevard or the Strip in Las Vegas, traffic is moving too fast and you lose that captive audience.”

No more billboards

Vehicle wraps are becoming more popular partly because of longer commute times for drivers and shorter leashes on traditional billboards.

A 2004 study by the Public Policy Institute of California found the average L.A. commuter spent 29 minutes getting to and from work, nearly triple the average in 1990. That’s bad news for most industries but an opportunity for marketers.

“People are so mobile. Everyone is doing so much, out and about, so it’s a logical place to reach busy consumers,” said Zach Rosenberg, general manger for the western region at Horizon Media, a brand management and media buying service.

At the same time that drive times are increasing, the number of prime billboards is decreasing. Cities, including Los Angeles, have stopped approving new billboards and tried to remove some, although the law requires a municipality to compensate the billboard owner.

Yarmey notes that billboards are not allowed on residential streets, only main boulevards and freeways, and the well-to-do neighborhoods most coveted by advertisers typically fight harder to limit or remove them. “That drives up the price of existing outdoor ads. But it also means simply less inventory for advertisers to buy,” she said.

“All the existing billboards are grandfathered, but they’re not approving new ones,” said Rosenberg. “I look at these strip malls along Ventura Boulevard as an example a dumpy little mall with a huge sign above it. That’s probably the most valuable real estate on the lot because of the income from that billboard.”

For specific locations, truck or car wraps seem the only option. Klein said that in Orange County, “you can’t get a billboard.” Yarmey added: “If you’re trying to reach Times Square and you’re priced out of the market, you have the answer with a vehicle wrap.”

Klein said a billboard along the Santa Monica (405) Freeway costs $45,000 but a truck with a wrap costs $10,000 for the same time span. “So we’re cheaper, but the same people see it,” he said.

Klein believes a moving vehicle with a wrap delivers a message better than a fixed sign. “You see billboards in the same place every day, so they blend in. With these, you see them in different places and times. If you have a number of trucks out there, the market awareness becomes incredible.”

Beyond all that, the advertising companies tend to like wraps because they are a relatively new and creative outlet for them.

“At agencies, there is a lot of pressure to come up with creative ideas for clients,” said Rosenberg. “This is a medium where you can do a lot of interesting things.”

Rosenberg’s agency, a pioneer in outdoor imagery, almost became the first company to wrap the George Washington Bridge in New York. Workers started to cover the structure with vinyl, but city officials killed the project at the last minute, he said.

“When you can come up with a wild factor, there’s PR value,” Rosenberg said. Many of L.A.’s entertainment-related advertisers relish that sort of value-added, he noted.

Opportunities in the wrap space have attracted a wave of entrepreneurs. Yarmey said that while national companies are in the market, local and regional vendors have sprung up, too. Because of the fragmentation, there is a dearth of statistics on the trend, however.