DMN3 Blog

Don E. Schultz, Ph.D.,  Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications
Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University

Having just completed several international teaching trips, (Austria, Australia, Germany, Greece, etc.) I am encouraged by what I’ve seen of the marketing industry’s future. The advertising and marketing communications students I have talked with, taught and observed (who will replace us greybeards), while unique, are probably some of the brightest, most innovative and enthusiastic that I have seen in my 30+ years of teaching. Yet, at the same time, they are some of the most impatient, unfocused and flighty I’ve ever seen as well.

An illustration will help.

The American Academy of Advertising (the association for professors who teach advertising and marketing communications) has an international convention every two years. In 2009, the meeting was held in Beijing. This year, it was in Australia at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

As part of the programming, a group of professors organized an interactive conference among and between advertising and marketing communications student groups from Nottingham University in the United Kingdom, Oklahoma State University in the U.S. and of course, QUT in Australia. Given the time differences, just getting this organized was a major feat. But, using teleconferencing, Skype and some land lines, it all worked as planned

The format was simple, have the student groups from the three schools discuss “The Future of Advertising and Marketing Communications”. All did an excellent job. They had done their homework, knew the issues and challenges they face, and were incredibly anxious to “get on with it”.

They believe, and rightfully so, that advertising and marketing communications has to be re-invented for a new, interactive marketplace. They have, as the saying goes “drunk the Kool-aid of new technology and interactivity”. Their primary frustration seemed to be more about convincing the senior managers in marketing organizations to get on board the “digital revolution” than the actual applications they know they will be using.

In short, advertising and marketing communications students are tethered to technology. They are amazingly similar in their views of what the world can and should be like. They simply leap over traditional cultural differences because they believe technology is the thread that holds everything together whether that be mobile, the web or the new social media. To them, the new cultural values are how involved and engaged you are in the new forms of media, not where you live or what accent you have.

Technology seems to have created a new, internationalist group of future communicators who “leap national boundaries” in the blink of an eye, are tied together with technologies they know and understand and believe the world they are going to create is going to be much different than the one they inherited from their current mentors.

The biggest question they seem to have is “can they drag the digital immigrants (us greybeards) into this new world where they grew up and where we all now live?” It may well be that the learning going forward must be among the older, not the younger practitioners of advertising and marketing communications. That’s scary, but, it’s exciting at the same time.