The Federation of European Direct Marketing on Sunday elected a new chairman, Ivan Hodac, who will serve for the next two years. Hodac is senior vice president of Time Warner Europe, and is based in Brussels, Belgium. He replaces Carel Rog, the chairman for the last two years.
The vote by the general assembly took place at the group’s annual forum, which is being held outside its Brussels headquarters for the first time.
The forum, in “sunny Strasbourg,” France, as vice chairman Jennifer Moseley put it in her opening remarks Monday morning, has had a large number of walk-in registrations, bringing the total number of attendees to about 360, up from about 250 last year. There are about 25 exhibitors. The conference, in the Palais de la Musique et des Congres, runs through Tuesday.
In an interview with DIRECT Newsline, Hodac noted that his predecessor had done an excellent job of overseeing the combination of the two groups that became Fedma in 1997. He said a major priority would be to continue that combination.
“They are reasonably well-combined, but there are still issues,” he said, mostly in merging procedures and systems. “We want to see that people on the staff work as a team and that they’re happy and proud to work for Fedma.”
The two groups that merged were Edma, or the European Direct Marketing Association (the trade group), and FDMA, or the Federation of European Direct Marketing (the lobbying group).
Another priority for Hodac will be to “define the core services that we can and should provide to the members and to scrub those that they are not interested in,” Hodac said. He thought that the group’s councils and electronic commerce are especially important.
Hodac, who is originally from Czechoslovakia, said that he will also focus on Eastern European countries, which, so far, have not been very active in direct marketing, “But they will be there,” he added.
“We’re delighted to see that it’s somebody from a company that clearly not only has mastered direct marketing but has mastered the global aspects,” H. Robert Wientzen, president and chairman of the U.S. Direct Marketing Association, said in an interview here. Wientzen added that Hodac is “energetic” and has “a lot of good ideas and we look forward to working with him.”
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