Meet the Broker: Christina Bashark
Today we meet Christina Bashark, vice president, business development at Edith Roman Associates, Inc./ePost Direct where’s she’s been for the past two years specializing in business-to-business. She came to that post after spending nine and a half years as director of business development at Worldata.
Overall, she works in the areas of e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, database marketing and postal direct mail.
Bashark started her career at the now-defunct List Technology Systems in New York City.
With the proliferation of electronic media over the last number of years, she feels the role of the list broker has evolved into media consultant.
“I think that the list industry has made a dramatic shift,” she says. “It’s shifted to online strategies, especially in the publishing arena.”
She attributes this in part to the decline of print advertising. This, in turn, is leading publishers to develop their digital products, create lead generation programs and otherwise monetize their Web sites through such means as online advertising and affiliate marketing.
Just the same, she feels old-fashioned direct mail is going to stick around but it will likely change and possibly get stronger for those that stick with the medium.
“I think that postal is going to stay but it’s not going to be as strong as it was once,” she says. “And I think that with fewer people in the mail those who are mailing are going to get better results because there won’t be as much competition in the mail.”
Of course, the recession is affecting business right now but that has its flip side, she argues.
“I think that allows for a tremendous amount of opportunity,Bashark says, noting that clients are making more use of things like customer profiling and database marketing.
When will the recession end?
Just as the downturn did not happen overnight, Bashark doesn’t think it will go away instantaneously either.
When not on the job, Bashark is raising her nine-year-old son and six- year-old daughter from her home in Boca Raton, FL where she principally works. When called up to Edith Roman’s headquarters in Pearl River, NY she gets a chance to visit her relatives in nearby Suffern.
