Hughes Leaves E-mail Better than he Found It

The e-mail marketing industry is about to lose an advocate who has arguably done more to keep commercial e-mail viable than any other individual.

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.

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 founded at commercial e-mail’s darkest hour.

More than 30 states had passed or were considering anti-spam laws, threatening to crush law-abiding e-mail marketing with a Byzantine maze of conflicting legislation.

On the federal level, Can Spam was being hashed out, and the only visible 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.

Goodman, Partner and Zornosa were right to tap Hughes to lead their fledgling organization.

Hughes brought to the industry a refreshing sense of humor and an ability to help bridge the gap between e-mail marketers and those whose job it is to protect people’s inboxes from spam.

I first met Hughes at the Federal Trade Commission’s spam summit in the spring of 2003. It was a tense meeting during which at one point fisticuffs would have broken out were it not for a physical intervention by then commissioner Orson Swindle.

During a break, Hughes and I were walking down a sidewalk when a group of anti-spammers appeared walking toward us. Without missing a beat, Hughes said: “Hey, it’s like the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story!” and began singing and snapping his fingers just as the rival gangs did in the first scene where they meet.

Everyone in the exchange laughed. It was a much needed moment of levity and I believe it helped put a human face on marketing for the handful of anti-spammers in the exchange. The fact that the anti-spammers laughed put a human face on them for me, as well.

It is no coincidence that around this time ISPs and marketers began to soften their adversarial relationship.

When Hughes took over the ESPC, he immediately began “dialing for CEOs,” as he put it, in an effort to get as many companies in e-mail marketing as possible on board. He succeeded. Though he is quick to deflect credit, Hughes and his staff brought together a strong coalition of e-mail marketing and related firms and helped them start behaving like a responsible, cohesive group concerned with keeping e- mail marketing viable.

“It was an incredibly important moment when all the big e-mail companies got together and said: ‘Spam is killing us,’” Hughes said. “We needed to show them [the Federal Trade Commission and Congress] that there was a whole spectrum of commercial e-mail out there.”

Under Hughes’s leadership, the ESPC introduced the ESPC Pledge, one of the first self-regulatory standards promoting permission-based e-mail marketing.

He also counts effective advocacy for marketers on Can Spam and creating a distinction for lawmakers and ISPs between legitimate e-mail marketers and spammers as two of the ESPC’s key accomplishments.

Hughes gave responsible e-mail marketers a cohesive voice in Washington that would not be sneered at, and better relations with ISPs—all at a time when they most needed it.

He leaves the industry far healthier than the way he found it.

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 the newsletter. “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.”

They better be as good as Hughes says they are. They have awfully big shoes to fill.