What are the pros and cons of a career in marketing?

OOH Media (Out-of-home advertising) sounds interesting.What are its Pros and Cons and how effective would it be on the market? How different it is from the Guerilla Marketing?

• Out of home advertising is focused on marketing to consumers when they are "on the go" in public places. Outdoor advertising formats fall into four main categories: billboards, street furniture, transit, and alternative. Guerrilla marketing is an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising strategy in which low-cost unconventional means (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti, sticker bombing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mobs) are utilized, often in a localized fashion or large network of individual cells, to convey or promote a product or an idea. The term guerrilla marketing is easily traced to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_warfare which utilizes atypical tactics to achieve a goal in a competitive and unforgiving environment. The concept of guerrilla marketing was invented as an unconventional system of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promotion_(marketing) that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget. Typically, guerrilla marketing campaigns are unexpected and unconventional, potentially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer are targeted in unexpected places.

• Answer:

  Outdoor advertising is passive, Guerrilla is active I notice outdoor advertising. It is rarely relevant to me and often it just serves as brand reinforcement. For example, I know that Western Digital is advertising its networked hard drives at Civic Center BART station in San Francisco. What I don't understand is why they would spend so much money to advertise that feature when their target market segment for this is relatively small and that they will seek additional information online, where advertising can be better targeted. I know that on Powell Street BART station in San Francisco, Aldo Shoes is advertising a 20% off coupon to shoe customers who post on Instagram a picture of Aldo products tagged with a special hashtag and then show up at the store. If I were a woman, it would have been a very effective ad because there is an Aldo store within two city blocks of that location. Guerrilla advertisers actively seek my attention. A good example would be the Blackberry mobile phone demo van. It parked in Financial District in San Francisco (Blackberry's core market segment) and showcased the Blackberry Z10 smartphone. I interacted with their staff and played with the phone. I can still tell you what impressed me about the phone. Consider that Blackberry is considered a dead brand but was previously the premier brand for this demographic. Parking a van with 3 staff members trained to engage people walking by cost Blackberry orders of magnitude less than the misguided Western Digital campaign I mentioned earlier. Outdoor advertising works great when you are targeting the mass market. I will likely use outdoor advertising inside BART system for one of my products. My customers routinely use it and the cost is not bad. I was quoted a reasonable price for advertising inside the trains on 22"x21" posters. This is described as "Car Card" in the media kit. Theaters and universities are frequent users of this media. Charity walk organizers use it often. Surprisingly, I don't see many smartphone apps advertised this way with the notable exception of http://www.seamless.com that did a massive station-wide takeover campaign recently. Movie companies use in-station advertising very often. They don't advertise in trains. To get to the point where this makes sense, I will first use guerrilla marketing to get early customers. For example, I wear an orange jacket to tech conferences and have an iPad mini running a demo as a necklace. That is very effective for me. After that, outdoor advertising is a scaling technique to reach more people passively. It should be combined with easy to type mobile URLs. For in-station ads (they are huge and referred to as two-sheet in the media kit) that you can walk up to, a QR code will make sense. For ads that are too far away to be scannable, having an easy to type URL makes more sense. You should use trackable phone numbers and tracking URLs that are unique for each advertising panel to measure the effectiveness of that particular ad and that particular location. I turned outdoor advertising into a guerrilla technique. I sit in the train on my way to San Francisco with an iPad running an eye-catching demo while hanging off my neck. It gets people curious and I send them a link to my demo directly to their smartphone. My new unannounced product then tracks whether these people open my demo and more. :) It would cost me less to have my information displayed in the cars on car cards than to do it guerrilla style. I would need a very effective ad, however, and that is hard to create. I will probably A/B test various ads in-person, guerrilla style. :) More details about what media is available to meHere is http://www.titan360.com (BART's outdoor media contractor that manages this) media kit that will make what I described a little clearer: http://titan360.com/presentation_media_kits/SanFranciscoMediaKit/