Michelle Bonat on Future of Advertising

OurBlook interviews Michelle Bonat, founder and CEO of marketing firm RumbaFish.

Social media are transforming the way that companies conduct PR and marketing campaigns. Can you explain the changes you have seen?

MB: It's a fact that businesses of all sizes want to engage deeper into the online social sphere. Yet, we see so many companies flailing when it comes to deploying and measuring the impact of their social media campaigns. Businesses continue to dump millions of dollars into the vast "social media ocean."

How is this affecting the journalism world, particularly newspapers who have been focused on traditional, ad-supported models? While Craigslist is usually cited for the demise of classifieds, is there anything other than the economic downturn to blame for the decline in display ads?

MB: As a product of these traditional ad-supported models, each of us sees more commercial messages each day than we can process. It’s simply way too much and as a result the advertising is not persuading us to buy. Clearly, these media organizations need a way to cut through the noise. It would greatly help them to leverage social media through "word of mouth" or evangelist marketing, whereby customers do the promotion instead of the company itself. Then to be able to measure it and quickly iterate on the results. This is how they will get an advantage over their competition.

What advice would you give newspapers that are currently trying to create a new model for revenue?

MB: They should be asking themselves two key questions. First, where is our audience spending its time? And second, who are our influencers and how can we engage them in line with how they want to communicate? They should at all times maintain the transparency which we all understand is important and especially so in social media.

Are magazines in the same boat as newspapers? If sleek, prosperous Gourmet magazine had to fold because of plummeting advertising, is there really much hope for other publications? What can they do?

MB: Magazines have the additional challenge that their readers engage on a less frequent basis than newspapers, unless they are connected to an online presence.  So again, increasing that level of engagement through social media and strategic interactive marketing campaigns would help.  It also has the benefit of saving time and money ... resulting in a better ROI.

Is there anything else you would like to say about advertising and print media?

MB: The world has changed and will continue to change. We all need to constantly look at what we know vs. what we assume in engaging our customers and find the right tools to close that gap.

(Michelle has an MBA in marketing from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. RumbaFish, of Palo Alto, Calif., recently launched on DEMO.)