Holding top positions in both marketing (CMO of Chase Home Lending) and communications (CCO, Chase). Amy Bonitatibus has a unique vantage point from which to look at the differences—and similarities—between the two fields.

"On the communication side," she says,"the PR is constant every day, fielding inquiries from the media, some reactive, some proactive, or announcing a new credit card or a new consumer banking product."

In her marketing position, "we are driving revenue for the home lending business." That entails "focusing on the customer's needs and cutting down on paperwork and just simplifying the process, but still making sure we have all of the information to give someone a very, very, large loan that they're going to be paying over the next 30 years."

But she also says the line between marketing and communications is not a hard and fast one."My home lending marketing team relies on communications" to get out such educational content to consumers as how to negotiate various relief efforts for mortgage holders during COVID.

Bonitatibus also encourages dialogue between employees from both sides of the communications/marketing divide. "All of my communications will go to both organizations, and the feedback was actually, I love learning more about marketing or I love learning more about communications."

When it comes to the content that is going out to consumers, she says that "the content that performs best is the content that doesn't feel paid, it doesn't feel forced." Bonitatibus tells Simon that "if you look at our social content, hopefully most people would never know if there's paid lift behind it or not."

She also addresses the challenges of getting messages out in a highly regulated space. "If we are putting out something that is product specific, it has to go through a legal and compliance approval. But that's kind of counterintuitive to social media, which is all about speed to market. So, we try to minimize the amount of posts that are hyper product driven and where we have to go through that approval chain."

That's a necessity, since "things that happen in everyday life crises and other moments, you don't have time to run it through the gamut of approvals. We have worked with our controls and legal team to come up with a process where we're still complying with regulations, but also living up to the spirit of the channel, which is real time, speed to market and content that customers want."

View all of the interviews in the “PR's Top Pros Talk” series. Subscribe to get notified when new episodes are available.

Interested in taking part? Contact Doug Simon at [email protected]

D S Simon Media helps clients get their stories on television through satellite media tours and by producing and distributing content to the media. The company also produces live social media events.