5Qs: IDG’s Bob Carrigan on the Web Closing the Gap with TV
In February, Bob Carrigan, CEO of IDG Communications, was named chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, taking over for 24/7 Real Media founder David Moore. A veteran of the print and online media worlds, Carrigan previously served on the IAB’s board for the past five years. During his 15-year media career, he’s logged time at Spinner.com and AOL. Carrigan is actually in the midst of his second tenure at IDG, having logged seven years at PC World in sales early on after starting his career as a college intern at IDG’s Digital News.
You were named IAB chairmain during the organization’s annual meeting in February. What initiative or initiatives do you plan on focusing on?
There were four things I outlined in my speech. Number one, it’s important to me to tackle the mobile space and how significant that is. We launched a mobile marketing center of excellence, which is now a key initiative. We don’t have to beat that dead horse. Clearly mobile is our present and future. Second, we need to move in a direction that attracts brand marketers, which is part of the reason we launched the Making Measurement Make Sense initative. Three, the majority of our brands in the IAB are consumer-facing. There has been a tremendous amount of innovation in the B2B space, so I want to see more programming and leadership from that work. On June 13, we’re going to hold our first B2B committee meeting. Lastly, I want to address the need for traditional media companies to act more like pure-play [digital] media companies. They should be directly R&D, and development to digital, or at least thinking that way. We try and think Web-first with everything. Read more