Bruno Park, display marketing manager, shares his career journey and how his team of four combine their talent and passion for constant improvement to grow GetYourGuide globally.
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I'm Brazilian-Korean, and I moved to Berlin from São Paulo around four and a half years ago. I joined the team earlier this year.
I studied business administration, majoring in international economics, and my master's degree is in international management. Prior to working at GetYourGuide, I worked for a lifestyle marketplace for curated art and was in the display and paid social team. It's the same field but completely different industries, which makes things interesting. Moving to the travel industry is super exciting.
I didn't exactly choose to work in display. It just happened.
At the beginning of my career, I started interning at banks and consultancies, but realized pretty quick that these fields weren’t right for me. I thought the culture and type of work were quite dull. So I ended up taking up a job at a traditional advertising agency by referral of a college friend.
I started working in PR, and one of my clients was a mobile attribution platform. So, I started learning more about online marketing. Then I started learning more about the industry and moved to work in ad networks, where I managed mobile app install campaigns for advertisers who wanted to increase their user base by putting ads in the mobile space.
I soon found out that display marketing was the perfect place for people who can navigate between analytical and creative competences.
The Display Marketing team is small but extremely efficient. There are four of us, and we work on specific channels across all GetYourGuide geographies.
That means that each one of us works as a specialists within our own advertising platform. We are also responsible for growing the platform, staying up to date with online marketing trends, and maintaining relationships with online advertising partners.
In addition, each one of us also takes on special projects according to our main competences and career development expectations. Some may choose to work more with data, others with brand and design or project management and automation.
I'm currently working on paid social activities, which means I manage the activities on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, and managing some small ad networks. My teammates work with Google Display, Youtube, and Display & Video 360 (DV360).
I think it's incredible how everyone in my team is super intelligent. We are even encouraged to learn things that are usually out of the scope of the job. Not only does the group have channel management knowledge, but they also have advanced technical knowledge. In many other companies, these types of talent are often divided into different departments.
As a result, this makes our team quite independent. We also move very fast in terms of understanding and solving problems. Also, it’s a fun and easy-going group of people.
First, understand the objectives set for each channel and how a channel can contribute to the broader goal. Growth can be quite a broad term, and every channel contributes differently to sub-objectives. Understanding the key capabilities and limitations of a channel is crucial for the success of overall numbers.
For example, you should understand the contribution of a search campaign versus a social campaign. The two are completely different. Having the same standards for different channels might result in underestimation of the potential growth. But it all depends on how aggressive or conservative the growth strategy is.
Personally, the most challenging part has been working in a completely new industry, travel. Before, I worked mostly with mobile apps advertisers in the commerce vertical in the Southeast Asian Market. So everything is very new and completely different.
The most rewarding part of the job is seeing how the small changes and decisions we take every day in our channels have an actual impact on the company's numbers. I think it shows that a considerable amount of people are actually seeing the message we are putting out there and taking action.
I can’t reveal too much, but I can say that there’s a lot of flexibility to constantly question, change, and improve the way things are done. The only rule is that everything has to be grounded in numbers and objectives that we set. That is why we design many types of tests in the way we manage campaigns. We have great support from the data and tech team to question some assumptions, and after that, we all look at the data to make proper decisions.
Well, in the startup community, it’s known that GetYourGuide is ahead of the curve when it comes to online marketing. When speaking to other professionals in the field, it always came up that the marketing technology at GetYourGuide was highly valued. The company is known for having a great relationship with partners like Google and Facebook, and our company is known to have quick access to their latest product releases.
At the same time, GetYourGuide, in my personal opinion, has never been a flashy startup where results are exaggerated. And it turned out to be true when I got here, there are always cool things happening here, and change happens very fast in a very down to earth way. So I joined as an excellent opportunity to learn.
GetYourGuide is an excellent education for online marketing. If you want to learn, it is the right place for that as we have access to the best tools and support. More than that, you will not be doing the same old optimization tasks every day. You will be pushed to dig deeper into the reasons why you take those daily optimization decisions and automate them.
The best part about working here is that the people are very grounded. Also, we have a product that adds real value to people’s lives. It’s also a completely new vertical inside the travel industry, which makes things more exciting.