WIESBADEN, GERMANY–DDV, the German direct marketing association, today named Bernd Kracke as president, the first holder of the job who will be paid. In the past, the position has been honorary.
Kracke will work with Holger Albers, who last week was appointed the association’s managing director. Both men will assume their new positions April 16. Efforts to find someone who could assume the duties of both president and managing director were abandoned after receipt of a 110 resumes failed to uncover a suitable candidate.
Friedhelm Lammoth, the outgoing president, told the DDV’s annual press conference here that the two positions demanded skills not readily found in one candidate. Traditionally, the managing director takes care of administrative functions and acts as a behinds-the-scene lobbyist with the federal and local governments. The president is to articulate the association’s future goals and act as its image maker with the press and public.
Outgoing managing director Hasso Herbst noted that the United States’ Direct Marketing Association several years ago had sought a successor to Jonnah Gitlin, who was 40 years old and came from the new media.
“They settled for someone who was 56 years old and came from a package goods industry,” Herbst said of Gitlin’s successor, H. Robert Wientzen.
Herbst pointed out that Kracke was 44 and a product of the new media. He was a professor of media creation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cologne and was educated in Hamburg and at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where he spent five years as an instructor.
The DIMA show was totally sold out, Lammoth said, with 361 exhibitors jammed into the conference hall. The show is expected to move to another location in the year 2000. Four cities are in the running: Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt and Duesseldorf. Duesseldorf, Herbst said, has offered “millions” to tempt DIMA to move there.
DDV, Lammoth said, was in good shape having added 92 companies to its roster so far this year, for a total of 779 members.
