Trevor Hughes has put in notice that by year’s end he will be leaving his post as executive director of the trade group E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition.
Besides the ESPC, Hughes has headed up two other online marketing trade groups—the Network Advertising Initiative and International Association of Privacy Professionals—for most of this decade, the IAPP being the largest.
In a letter to members, Hughes said the IAPP had grown too large for him to also manage the NAI and its sub-unit, the ESPC.
“It is with no small amount of melancholy that I write to announce that, effective at the end of this year, I will be transitioning to the IAPP full-time,” he wrote. “The IAPP and ESPC have both grown significantly over the years, and the IAPP now has 6,000 members in 34 countries and 26 full-time staff. As a result, this means that I will need to hand over the reins of the ESPC.”
Readers of this newsletter will most closely associate Hughes with the ESPC, which he headed from its founding in 2002 by three female chief executives: Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact; Lynda Partner, then CEO of GotMarketing; and Anna Zornosa then CEO of Topica.
The ESPC was arguably founded at commercial e-mail’s darkest hour.
More than 30 states had passed or were considering anti-spam laws, threatening to turn law-abiding e-mail marketing into a Byzantine maze of conflicting legislation.
On the federal level, Can Spam was being hashed out, and the only pro-e-mail-marketing trade group on Capitol Hill was the Direct Marketing Association, an organization that had no credibility on the issue of spam. The reason: then DMA president Robert Wientzen was arguing for unsolicited e-mail by calling for marketers to be allowed “one-bite-of-the-apple.”
At the same time, inbox providers, such as Hotmail and AOL, were blocking commercial messages wholesale.
“They [Goodman, Partner and Zornosa] recognized that if the industry didn’t get its act together, e-mail could go the way of the dinosaur,” said Hughes in an interview. “It was an incredibly important moment when all the big e-mail companies got together and said: ‘Spam is killing us.’ We needed to show them [the Federal Trade Commission and Congress] that there was a whole spectrum of commercial e-mail out there.”
Hughes counts effective advocacy for marketers on Can Spam and creating a distinction with lawmakers and ISPs between legitimate e-mail marketers and spammers as two of the ESPC’s key accomplishments.
Taking over for Hughes at the NAI and ESPC will be Jim Campbell, who is currently assistant director, and Justin Weiss, associate counsel. The two will share duties as leaders of both organizations, said Hughes, adding their titles are still being worked out.
Campbell has been with the organization for four years. Previously, he managed e-mail for TripAdvisor.com. Before that, he was vice president of marketing for TargetMail.
“[Campbell is] very smart, very experienced in the industry,” wrote Hughes in an e-mail to Newsline. “Justin is a brilliant young attorney. He has worked with us for two and a half years and knows CAN SPAM better than I do.”
