IAB Elects New Board Members
The online advertising trade group's class of 10 new directors reflects paid search's newfound prominence.
The online advertising trade group's class of 10 new directors reflects paid search's newfound prominence.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Internet ad industry’s largest trade group, announced late Tuesday the election of 10 new directors, representing one third of its board.
The roster of new board members has the usual suspects among the ranks of the Internet ad industry, including executives from MSN, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and SportsLine.com. However, also represented on the list are the online ad industry’s newcomers, most notably sales executives from search companies Google and LookSmart.
The additions of Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president of advertising sales, and Robert Goldberg, the senior vice president of sales and marketing at LookSmart, show how much influence paid search has gotten in the industry. The two execs will join paid search giant Overture’s Ted Meisel on the board to give paid search a formidable presence.
Paid search, led by the successes of Overture and Google, has been one of the few recent bright spots in the Internet advertising industry.
Other new faces are Javier Saralegui, the president of Univision Online, and Jeffrey Schwartz, president and chief executive of Autobytel. Wireless and mobile city guide publisher Vindigo’s chief executive, Jason Devitt, was also elected to the board, as was Bill Furlong, B2Bworks’ chief executive.
Despite the representation from growth areas, such as paid search, and growing Internet demographics, such as the Hispanic market, the IAB board remains dominated by online publishers, including Weather.com, CondeNet, The Wall Street Journal Interactive, Forbes.com, and the Walt Disney Internet Group.
The IAB’s board will help craft a message for the industry as it attempts to move from a niche of the advertising industry to an integrated part of it. The IAB has spent the year rolling out research as part of its “Cross-Media Optimization Study” to show the effectiveness of adding more interactive to the media mix of traditional companies’ ad campaigns.
From 2000 to 2001, the IAB’s board more than doubled in size. This year, echoing the industry’s stagnant growth, the size of the board stayed the same.
The full list of board members: (asterisks indicate newly elected members)
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