Cars.com president slated for Milwaukee event

Cars.com president slated for Milwaukee event

MILWAUKEE — The president of Cars.com and one of the Internet’s business pioneers will talk about online media and other Internet topics in the Sept. 29 inaugural speaker event of the new Milwaukee Interactive Marketing Association.
The speaker, Mitch Golub, has an extensive background in new media, new business start-ups and developing new products. He joined Classified Ventures, which includes Cars.com, after a 21-year career at the Tribune Company, where he served most recently as a senior executive in the company’s New Media Group.
Golub’s tenure in the Internet world makes him a strong inaugural speaker for the new Milwaukee group, said Andy Vogel, general sales manager for Journal Interactive in Milwaukee and president of the Milwaukee Interactive Marketing Association.
Vogel was involved in the start-up of a similar organization in Chicago in 1997, the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association; that group now has more than 1,000 members.
While the Milwaukee group might not approach that membership number, Vogel sees strong interest in the group and anticipates membership growth. He also sees value in bringing those people together.
“In the year that I have been in Milwaukee, I have seen a lot of very talented people doing a lot of interactive tasks and doing them in different ways,” Vogel said. “We hope to offer a forum for sharing those ideas to share best practices. The Internet is part of the standard set of tools for every business in Milwaukee today. This group, like other similar groups in Chicago and New York, will offer a forum for people trying to understand how they should operate in the changing digital economy.”
Vogel said he has been impressed with the area’s technology talent, calling it “fairly substantial” and saying one of his goals is to call greater national attention to that talent. He noted that Fortune Magazine recently ranked Milwaukee ninth in the nation when counting the number of Fortune 500 headquarters that call the city home. That places Milwaukee ahead of such technology and Internet hot-spots as San Francisco and Seattle, he added.
The new Milwaukee group has attracted a variety of industry representatives since it was started mid-summer, including investment banking, technology, media, and advertising.
More information on the Sept. 29 event, which will be held in downtown Milwaukee, can be found on the group’s website. Its next major event will be an October panel discussion on community-based and individual-based publishing.

David Niles is senior contributing editor for WTN. He can be reached at dniles@wistechnology.com.