The board of the Federation of European Direct Marketing elected Ara Cinar chairman at its annual general meeting late last month.
Cinar replaces Holger Albers, the general manager of Deutscher Direktmarketing Verband, the German Direct Marketing Association. A new chairman is elected yearly. Five vice chairmen also were elected. There are usually four vice chairmen, but a FEDMA spokeswoman said Cinar wanted to ensure continuity so he invited Albers, as outgoing chair, to be an extra vice chair.
Cinar began his career at Bertelsmann Austria in 1970 as an assistant to the CEO. In 1974, he moved to the company's headquarters in Germany, where he managed the music and book club in Scandinavia and coordinated the music and special music projects for all European markets. In 1976 he was named vice president of marketing for the Group France-Loisirs, currently Bertelsmann's largest worldwide club with 4 million members. He was promoted in 1997 to executive senior vice president of marketing for book clubs worldwide.
Currently, Cinar is an executive board member of the Group France-Loisirs book club and coordinator of all new business by Bertelsmann. He is also president of Voyages-Loisirs, a direct seller of vacation rentals in France that is part of Group France-Loisirs. He also was a board member of the U.S. Direct Marketing Association for six years, and most recently was FEDMA's treasurer.
Cinar said that he intended “to strengthen the networking functions of FEDMA and to ensure that the lobbying at the European level continues to be successful and well-resourced.”
FEDMA has more than 250 direct members and represents nearly 10,000 companies through its national DMA members.
