IAB names IDG's Carrigan as new chairman

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, entering what’s shaping up as a critical year for the digital advertising industry, has a new chairman. The association announced today that IDG Communications CEO Bob Carrigan will assume the chairman’s role, replacing David Moore, chairman and founder of 24/7 Real Media. 

Carrigan already has a full plate of priorities. In a phone interview, he described his non-operating role as helping to guide the association and working with the IAB’s leadership team on its strategic initiatives for 2011. Those six initiatives include:

• Making Measurement Make Sense: a cross-industry task force designed to reconcile the discrepancies in current media measurement approaches
• Building Brands Online: Helping marketers use the Web more effectively for creative, brand-oriented campaigns.
• Protecting Privacy: Ongoing efforts around the online ad industry’s self-regulatory program and other consumer privacy issues.
• Data Demystification: Helping media companies and advertisers use data to make marketing programs more effective.
• Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence: A newly launched initiative formed to help media companies and marketers address the issues surrounding the next level of interactivity with consumers enabled by the mobile Web.
• Supply Chain Simplification: Exploring ways to simplify and add clarity to the online advertising issue supply chain.

“We have to do better in all of these areas to make it as frictionless as possible for marketers to move more money into digital,” Carrigan said.

Another priority is finding a CEO to replace Randall Rothenberg, who stepped down in December to become Time Inc.’s chief digital officer. A search committee is in place, led by Moore, but Carrigan said he can’t commit to a timeframe on naming the new CEO. “It’s obviously a big priority for us, and the search committee is off and running,” he said.