[Bell got his feet wet in online marketing as director of retail marketing and e-business at Ford Motor Co.] My first job was to clean up the mess from the various Internet acquisitions made at Ford, ... The real gem was forddirect.com, which we were able to establish technically, and also gain the support of the dealer network via ownership and usage. In many ways, the things I learned at Ford about how they structured the Web influenced my later decisions at Daimler-Chrysler.

Jeff Bell