Kudos to Don Schultz, Father of IMC
It isn’t often one gets to be in the presence of someone who changed a profession, so I jumped at the chance recently to attend a ceremony at Northwestern University honoring Don Schultz with a newly created award, the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award.
Schultz, who is a regular columnist for Marketing News, is one of the fathers of integrated marketing communications. It’s hard to imagine a time before IMC but Schultz certainly can; he helped bring together the siloed worlds of what was then called promotion, advertising and public relations into what became the IMC program at NU’s Medill (called the Medill School of Journalism when I earned my journalism masters there, but that’s a blog post for another time).
Having IMC in what had been the journalism school instead of the business school has always made for some interesting tensions at NU, something Schultz’s alluded to in his acceptance speech. I personally think it helped the program prosper, freeing it from any preconceived notions from business school academia but that too is subject for another post.
It was wonderful to see someone like Schultz honored. I look forward to working with him on Marketing News and AMA’s Marketing Management, for which he also writes a regular column. We’ve also been talking about putting out a book of his collected columns of the last decade, so keep watch for that.
And if you’d like to read more about the ceremony, marketing guru Gary Slack has a post on his blog with photos and more history that's well worth reading.
