The Association for Interactive Marketing (AIM) has named Michael Aronowitz as executive director. Aronowitz was most recently director of business development at Monster Worldwide.
Aronowitz has served as both a vendor and marketer within the interactive marketing space. Before joining Monster, he founded Zmichaels, Inc. a direct mail agency, and ran its salesoutlet.com unit, which provided turnkey e-tail and marketing offerings to the business-to-business-to-consumer community.
Aronowitz began his career at Concepts In Color, which specializes in direct mail catalog and in-store circular post-production services.
“Catalogs are never going to go away, but between paper, postage and printing, it’s expensive to put a book together,” Aronowitz said, explaining why he embraced the Internet as a marketing channel.
At Monster, Aronowitz spearheaded development of “cost- per-lead” acquisition, under which companies pay for online prospects only after the lead has filled out a survey or qualification card on the site.
Aronowitz is understandably bullish on the online arena, citing an increase in startups and the loosening of venture capital purse strings. He also anticipates a spike in online advertising spending, as more firms become sophisticated about paid search engine marketing, contextual advertising and other forms of electronic advertising.
The biggest thorn he sees the industry facing is spyware – the seemingly benign programs consumers download that can serve as back doors for pop-up and pop-under advertisements, not to mention having one’s computer hijacked by spammers.
