Tips from an Ad Intern:

On poster distribution and hanging

This post is not so much about the art of taping up a poster, although I will touch on that. It is about my experience distributing promotional posters and flyer all around San Diego. These tips I learned fist hand from my biggest task off the #bgsd campus yet- distributing the Seaport Village's Busker Festival promotional material. The event is next weekend April 16 and 17.

It looks REALLLy cool.

Tip #1: Choose the best locations to reach your audience.

It's tough these days to find space available for public postings, but I had pretty good luck focusing mainly on cafes and small shops. The cafes that were targeted were both small privately owned coffee shops and large chains like Starbucks. The shops that were chosen were a mix of salons and clothing stores with customer bases that seemed to fit the demographic of people interested in a busker festival.

This array of location choices should give us a good mix of people being exposed to the flyers. A wide variety of people frequent these locations; families, singles, college kids and people interested in the arts and community.

Tip #2: Google maps is your new best friend.

Not only can you add multiple locations to your route, but you can also rearrange your different locations to create the most efficient path.

Step one; organize your locations by zone in the city. For example my selected areas were Little Italy, Downtown, Hillcrest, and North Park.

Step two; plug in all location you wish to visit, chose your mode of

transportation (bike, foot, car, public transport), and then click and drag your via points to create the best route.

And your done, Tah-Dah!

Tip #3: Park efficiently.

Chances are even if your locations are in walking distance from one another; you'll need to park your car. Don't always pay at the first lot you see, especially in the downtown area. The prices can range from $5-12 an hours sometimes. If you spend an extra few minutes driving around you can usually find a 30 min spot, or at least a metered spot that you can pay $1 to for an hour and use up some of that change weighing down your purse or pockets.

Tip #4 and #5: Be prepared and smile.

People react more happily towards happy people! It's science. Be polite, seem interested and always ask questions with a smile. Storekeepers will want to help you out more if you seem interested in your product and care about their company.

Shop owners also appreciate you coming prepared with scotch tape and thumbtacks. The only surface I wasn't prepared for in my distribution path this week was magnet boards. All of the Starbucks in San Diego that I went to had "community boards" which was amazing, but they were all magnetic. This only caused problems when there were no open magnets, but they did allow me to move things around in order to post my flyer.

Best of all, I got to see parts of the city I'd never seen before & enjoy a few beautiful days.

~Sadie :)