Honoring the Father of Integrated Marketing Communications

April 12, 2010 | by Wendy Leopold

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism honored its longtime faculty member Don E. Schultz with the school's first Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award Friday, April 9.

Widely known as the "father of integrated marketing communications," Schultz joined the Medill faculty in 1977 after two highly successful decades in media and advertising management. The author of more than a dozen books, he has written numerous book chapters, prefaces and forewords for leading books in the field of communications.

A regular columnist of Marketing Management and Marketing News magazines, Schultz is the founding editor of the Journal of Direct Marketing. His research and teaching currently focus on communication integration, branding and the financial measures of marketing and communication.

The word "mentor" is one that many Medill graduates used when describing their former Northwestern professor. Alan Cubbage -- a student in Schultz's brand-new part-time master's program in advertising in the late 1980s and now Northwestern's vice president of university relations -- said he consulted with Schultz many times during the course of his own career in communications.

Schultz, professor emeritus-in-service of integrated marketing communications, also is president of the Evanston-based global marketing consultancy, Agora, Inc. He continues to travel the world to lecture, conduct seminars and conferences and consult. Schultz has held or currently holds visiting, adjunct and guest professorships at universities in Australia, China, Finland and other countries.

At Northwestern, Schultz has taught courses on creative strategy, sales promotion, direct marketing, advertising, brand and brand valuation marketing and global marketing communications.

A member of the National Advertising Review Board, Schultz was named Direct Marketing Educator of the Year in 1989 and American Advertising Federation's Advertising Educator of the Year in 1992. In 1998, he was named one of the 80 Most Influential People in the Sales and Marketing World by Sales & Marketing Management magazine.

David Protess, the Medill journalism professor whose name is virtually synonymous with investigations of wrongfully convicted death row inmates, also has been named a recipient of the inaugural Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award. Protess will be awarded the honor later in the year.