A founding member was Bill Snow, who first started to alter tobacco billboards with graffiti, and continued to be active in anti-smoking and littering campaigns.

Together, Bill Snow, Ric Bolzan and Geoff Coleman coined the acronym BUGAUP and began adding it to the altered billboards, to link the graffiti to a movement rather than the random activity of individuals.

The movement aimed mainly at cigarette and alcohol advertising, often blanking out letters and adding others to promote their view that the product is unhealthy.

The Cancer Council of Western Australia states that the BUGA-UP campaign of the mid 1980s "radicalised the advertising debate and made it suddenly more respectable for previously conservative medical associations and colleges to rattle the legislative cage".

[2] Former Daily News reporter Joanne Fowler states that prior to the BUGA-UP campaigns of the 1980s, journalists were unwilling to publish articles critical of the tobacco industry because they were seen to be mundane.