Increasingly it has been used to promote video games and even feature prominently within them, reflecting a real life struggle between street artists and the law.

Graffiti as a commercial activity dates back to Ancient Greece,[1][2] when pottery makers employed artists to decorate their items with motifs and intricate designs.

further "Japanization" of children's culture is cited to be taking place through forms of graffiti in video games and in the increasing popularity of Japanese innovations such as anime.

However, due to illegalities some of the street artists were arrested and charged with vandalism, and IBM was fined more than US$120,000 for punitive and clean-up costs.

For instance in Chicago, despite a significant following in graffiti artistry, in the mid-1980s a commercial which featured a kid spraying "The end is near" caused considerable outrage by Chicago citizens who protested to the Ford Motor Company to take the commercial off air as they believed it encouraged children to freely graffiti property as they desire.

[19] Similarly, in 2005, Peter Vallone Jr., a City Council member in New York and several other councilors protested against Sony's decision to use graffiti commercially in their PlayStation Portable advertising in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Miami as they believed it would have a negative influence on children and encourage them to deface property.

[20] In New York City, legal graffiti and employment has become big business, appearing with owners' permission on everything from walls to railroad boxcars.

[21] Bronx-based TATS CRU has made a name for themselves doing legal advertising campaigns for companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Toyota, and MTV.

In the United Kingdom, Covent Garden's Boxfresh used stencil images of a Zapatista revolutionary in the hopes of cross referencing would promote their store.

[24] The Art Crimes website is the first to be established in the field of commercial graffiti and hires some sixty artists to produce artwork.

The Jet Set Radio series (2000–2003) tells the story of a group of teens fighting the oppression of a totalitarian police force that attempts to limit the graffiti artists' freedom of speech[8] and others such as Rakugaki Ōkoku series (2003–2005) for Sony's PlayStation 2[25] revolves around an anonymous hero and his magically imbued-with-life graffiti creations as they struggle against an evil king who only allows art to be produced which can benefit him.

Similarly Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure (2006), features a story line involving training in graffiti artistry and fighting against a corrupt city and its oppression of free speech, as in the Jet Set Radio series.

This creates several things such as tourism, the need for urban development, and mainstream attraction which opens the ways for museums and galleries to adopt Graffiti in their collections.

Secondly, as graffiti still chooses social, political and cultural issues as subject matter the photography and internet allow the message to travel around the globe.

Lastly, graffiti started and still takes place in the urban, abandoned, and marginalized areas where the residents are from various social levels.

This type of marketing has a way of going viral as it is done in a public place with limited resources but with new technology such as smart phones which can upload pictures and videos instantly to social media, so if there is legal permission by the government for graffiti people would do it during peak hours in communities for maximum exposure[35]( Navrátilová, L. Milichovský, F(2015)).