2001 Advertising Education Summit

Findings and Recommendations

N.B. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States and subsequent actions were not part of our lives during the Summit. The unprecedented magnitude of these events has had a huge impact on both our culture and economy. In light of these changes, the recommendations posited in this report appear to be even more important as educators develop new strategies for making their academic programs more relevant and useful in uncertain social, political and economic times.

I. Introduction

The introduction sets the stage for the following sections of this report that summarize the conclusions, recommendations and future actions suggested by the individuals who participated in the conference.

The conference was held at The University of Texas (UT) in Austin, Texas on April 21, 2001. It was an event jointly sponsored by the American Advertising Federation and UT’s Department of Advertising. The objectives of the Summit were threefold: (1) to facilitate an exchange of ideas about future problems and opportunities facing both the advertising industry and advertising education; (2) to develop a common sense of purpose and direction for advertising educators as they adjust their curricula to the needs of both students and the industry; and, (3) to generate a document reporting the major conclusions and directions identified during the Summit with an emphasis on the implications for educators. This White Paper is that document.

To achieve these objectives, representatives from 25 academic programs participated in the conference. The mix of universities included all of the top 10 programs as ranked by AAF advisors in a recent survey conducted by Richards, Taylor and Woolley[1] plus a mix of other university programs. The other universities invited to participate represented a cross-section of excellent programs from smaller, and in some cases, less widely-known schools.

The heart of the Summit program consisted of six breakout groups that focused on the critical areas of change and opportunity facing advertising education during the next five years. These areas were identified by the Summit organizing committee in the initial stages of conference planning and later refined by gathering data from participants in advance of the conference. The five content areas addressed in the breakout groups were the basic building blocks of the Summit. These content areas were: (1) Advertising Curriculum I: Evolving Mission and Coursework for Productive Programs; (2) Advertising Curriculum II: Keeping Pace with the Technological Curve plus International and Multicultural Issues; (3) Industry Alliances: Promoting Relevant Relationships; (4) Faculty & Funding Issues: Finding & Keeping Good People and Capitalizing on Programmatic Strengths; and, (5) Student Issues: Building a Strong Student Collective. (Note that given the over-arching importance of curriculum issues, the organizing committee elected to have two separate breakout groups focus on the issues included in this area.)

To set the stage for the discussions and consensus building that the organizing committee hoped would take place during thebreakout sessions, two groups of speakers were invited to open the conference by addressing what they saw as the key issues critical to the future of advertising education. The first group (Rick Boyko, Ogilvy & Mather, New York; and Scott Helbing, Dell Computers, Austin) represented highly respected practitioners’ and advertising managers’ perspectives and the second group (Linda Scott, University of Illinois; Pippa Seichrist, Miami Ad School; and, Mary Alice Schaver, Michigan State University) represented educators’ perspectives.

After the general session presentations of the industry and educator perspectives described above, Summit participants met in their breakout groups to discuss and then draw conclusions about opportunities/problems in their respective areas. Two UT faculty members served as co-facilitators of each of the six breakout groups. A graduate assistant was assigned to each of the breakout sessions to take notes and audiotape the discussions that took place.

The breakout groups met for roughly two hours to develop a draft report that was then presented in a general session. Approximately two hours were devoted to the general session reports and discussion. After the general session reports, the break-out groups met again individually to draft their final conclusions and recommendations. These meetings gave the break-out groups an opportunity to incorporate the information from the General Session into their thinking. A summary of these conclusions and recommendations is presented in a separate section of this White Paper. The concluding section of this White Paper summarizes the most important recommendations posited at the Summit and outlines appropriate future action.

We are confident that the ideas and dialogue stimulated by this conference have set the stage for future Summits. The speed of change in media, delivery systems and industry interests all seem to demand such meetings. Hence, we look forward to working with you in planning Advertising Education Summit II in the not-too-distant future.

Finally, along with our partners at the AAF, we would like to receive your reactions to this White Paper. We encourage you to contact us with your comments and suggestions. Please send your comments to John Murphy via e-mail at jhmurphy@mail.utexas.edu ASAP but no later than March 1, 2002.

II. Issues Critical to the Future of Advertising Education:

Industry Perspectives

Client Perspective

Mr. Scott Helbing, Vice President for Global Brand Strategy at Dell Computer Corporation, provided his views on the challenges facing advertising education from the perspective of an industry client. He noted the following important changes in the field of advertising.

The Top 10 “Future of Advertising Issues”

1. People will continue to want information but they will want it when they want it in the form they want it, and the audience will be in control;

2. Message alignment/consistency critical;

• New Media, new technologies and the Internet

• Truly mobile target

3. Creativity will be more important;

• Creativity will come from many areas

4. Advertising will be more closely measured;

5. Deadlines literally every minute;

6. Lines between PR and marketing blurring;

• Increased pressure to treat news releases as advertisements

7. Brands will always be important; start with “blocking and tackling”;

8. The marketplace will become truly global;

9. Media planning will be a critical skill set; and

10. The Internet’s importance will be enormous.

The role of advertising education, according to Mr. Helbing, should be the following:

• Teach the value of brands and how to build brands plus the role advertising plays in brand

development;

• Prepare students to work with and understand all the tools available to create advertising:

positioning/strategy, media, production, research, planning, the web, POS, merchandising,

promotion, product placement, guerilla marketing, managing budgets, etc.;

• Educate students to understand and appreciate that advertising is a tool in the

marketing/communication plan;

• Give them as much “real world” experience as possible;

• Help them leverage their unique value to agencies/clients, and finally,

• Teach your students to “grind it out” because that is what it takes to build brands and

make great advertising.

Agency Perspective

Mr. Rick Boyko of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency gave his perspectives on the needs of the agency world with respect to advertising education.

Mr. Boyko first showed the audience two groups of television commercials -- one that he characterized as poor in terms of its creative impact and effectiveness and the other he characterized as excellent. He then asked, with respect to these creative executions, the following question:

Why is a great creative agency able to do outstanding brand building work on

one account, yet ordinary, relatively invisible work on another?

His answer to the above question was one he believed is not considered either in the industry or schools: the relationship between agency and client. “In a word, trust. Trust between the agency and client is absolutely central to producing great work, and you can see this in one case after another.” His detailed views on this matter are quoted below:

When you look at the work that has been done in our business that is really outstanding – whether it’s Budweiser or Apple or Volkswagen – if you dig a little deeper, and start to examine the factors that led to that great work, there’s one thing you always find. A very strong and trusting relationship between the client and the agency. Usually it’s a relationship involving a client who really understands the brand…and an agency that understands how to create a message that resonates with consumers. But it’s also a relationship where client and agency understand EACH OTHER, and know how to collaborate to get the best out of each other…and, most of all, trust each other.

Just look at the relationship between Lee Clow of Chiat/Day and Steve Jobs of Apple. What you find is two people coming together around one vision…trusting each other, learning how to appreciate each other’s expertise, and developing a true give-and-take relationship. And the result of that was the kind of bold advertising breakthrough we saw with “1984” and other Apple work.

You find the same elements if you look at Dan Wieden’s relationship with Phil Knight of Nike…or our own relationship with the client on IBM, Abby Kohnstamm, I could name a handful of other similar partnerships – Goodby Silverstein and the California Milk Board, Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Levi’s, Hal Riney and Saturn. In fact, I would say that if you take almost any of the truly outstanding campaigns of recent years, and you go behind the scenes, you’re going to find one of these special trusting relationships between client and agency.

But unfortunately, these relationships are extremely rare in the business. For every truly collaborative partner like Steve Jobs, there are countless clients who don’t trust the agency, don’t really understand the business we’re in, and who rely too much on process. Go to any agency, no matter how creative, and ask them how many great client relationships they have. If they’re being honest, they’ll tell you that maybe they have one or two – if they’re lucky.

Why is that the case? I think maybe it’s partly because clients aren’t being trained properly. As they’re in the process of getting their MBAs, there is no class for them on how to deal with, and get the best out of, an agency. And so they come out of school thinking that good advertising is all about process, and about applying rules they read in some marketing textbook.

And when it comes time for them to meet with their ad agencies, these young marketers start giving mandates to the agency – as in, “this is the process we’re going to use, and this is how we’re going to test it.” Meanwhile, the creative guys at the agency are sitting there listening to this brilliant 28-year-old MBA with all the answers, and they’re nodding their heads, but the whole time they’re thinking: This guy just doesn’t get it.

This is not a good foundation on which to build trust.

By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that those agency creatives aren’t part of the problem, too. They are—because they also lack sufficient training in this area of building relationships and partnerships. You see, they don’t really understand the client or his point of view any better than he does theirs.

What we’re dealing with are two completely different species – the marketing people and the creative people – and they tend to look at the world in very different ways. On the one side you have the guy who is process-driven, perhaps a bit formulaic, and narrowly focused. On the other side, you have the creative person who revels in chaos, is not particularly organized, who doesn’t believe in formulas and looks at things more broadly. And the question is, how do you get these mismatched people to understand, appreciate, and trust each other?

I don’t necessarily have the answer to that, but I think one place to start is with you. At the schools I’ve been to, there seems to be a real void in the curriculum right now in terms of teaching the interpersonal skills needed to build great relationships between agency people and client-side people.

To me, it seems logical that in marketing education programs, there should be some attempt to teach MBA students how to get the most out of an agency – including how to relate to all those quirky creative people, how to better understand and appreciate the ways creative people work, and why it makes sense for them to work that way. Conversely, in our advertising departments, we should be teaching creative people how to relate to future clients – how to get them to move beyond process and look at things in a more open way, while also knowing when to step back and

respect their authority and their expertise. In other words, learning the art of give-and-take with someone who is very different from you.

Maybe we need separate courses, one for the marketing students and one for ad students. Or, maybe we need to bring these two types of students together in the same course, giving them a preview of what it’s going to be like when they actually have to work with each other. Maybe we sit them down together and make them both study the partnerships that have worked—Clow and Jobs, Wieden and Phil Knight, and so forth.

As far as the specifics of how best to do this, you all know more about that than I do. So to answer John Murphy’s question of where the advertising and marketing communication business is headed in the future and how you can play a major role in it, I offer up this challenge. We need all of you, the educators, to come up with a curriculum that connects today’s students with the real world issues in the business right now.

Because ultimately if we’re going to improve the quality of the work being produced – if we want more ads like that first batch we saw, and less like the second batch – we have to begin by helping students understand that good advertising comes out of trusting partnerships. And with that in mind, all of us need to figure out ways to help build more of that trust.

III. Issues Critical to the Future of Advertising Education:

Academic Perspectives

Three individuals heavily involved in the administration of advertising education programs were invited to present their views on the current issues in and the future of advertising education. These three were selected to represent the diverse nature of advertising educational philosophies and programs in the field. Their views are summarized below.

Dr. Linda Scott, Head, Department of Advertising, College of Communications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Scott discussed the importance of changing technology and its relationship to the university environment as well as the challenges of developing a faculty and curriculum in a research-oriented university context.

Her presentation centered upon the nature of the recently revised advertising curriculum at the undergraduate level at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An outline of that program is shown below as presented by Dr. Scott.

Course of Study:

Required: “Introduction to Advertising” and “Advertising Research Methods.”

The remaining five courses that each student takes may be chosen from among the following seven “core” courses:

• Persuasion and Consumer Response

• Audience Analysis

• Advertising Creative Strategy and Tactics

• Social and Cultural Context of Consumption

• Classic Campaigns

• Consumer Communications and the Public

• Advertising History.

Each student is also allowed two more electives to be taken from the advertising curriculum. He or she may use one of the courses listed above or other electives or special topics periodically offered by the Department (e.g., “Women in Advertising” or “International Advertising”).

Course Descriptions

Persuasion and Consumer Response. Addresses what makes a mass-mediated message persuasive by reviewing theories of mass communication and persuasion, consumer information-processing, and advertising effectiveness.

Classic Campaigns. Examines the advertising campaigns that have been seen as the best examples of this genre during the past century. Includes the writings of famous advertising authors on the rhetorical principles of advertising.

Consumer Communications and the Public. Addresses the interface between marketing activity and various public institutions and actions: government agencies, consumer groups, boycotts, litigation.

Advertising History. Teaches the important events, forces, people, and technologies that helped advertising to become an important institution in modern America.

Audience Analysis. Analyzes the markets served by various advertising media and factors to consider in the selection and evaluation of media

Social and Cultural Context of Advertising. Studies advertising as a cultural force and social institution and its role in communications, society, and economics.

Advertising Creative Strategy and Tactics. Presents the theory and practice of advertising message planning and creation for print and broadcast media; development of creative platforms and competitive benefit strategies.

Pippa Seichrist[2] of the Miami Ad School

Mrs. Seichrist presented the following scenarios about the future of advertising and advertising education as a challenge to the thinking of conventional views of advertising education. These views are from the perspective of a specialized advertising educational institution.

She posed the following “what if” questions to participants:

1. WHAT IF:

broadband comes tomorrow?

Perhaps sooner.

2. WHAT IF:

media formats change?

Perhaps sitcoms, dramas, or all entertainment programs; events (sports or otherwise); infomercials; MTV; videogames, DVD’s; TV commercials; information; print; outdoor; direct advertising; cinema; radio and the web––all merged.

3. WHAT IF:

all formats became interactive?

Perhaps billboards transmit to our cell phones –– while we’re going seventy miles an hour on the highway the Holiday Inn billboard sends us direction to their closest motel and books the room for us.

Perhaps our cell phone has built-in replay of the sports event we’re watching live.

Or gives us instant stats of every player on the field including the superstar’s favorite brand of cleats.

Perhaps the viewer can participate virtually. Perhaps using Foxtrax technology GPS with in-car sensors will allow us to drive against our NASCAR heroes in real time.

(Article: New York Times, April 15, 2001.)

4. WHAT IF:

events become graphic manipulation?

Perhaps the viewer designs the uniforms, the scoreboard, the graphics on the fence, illuminates the football, and joins in the huddle. Perhaps the viewer picks the camera views and keeps a ‘picture-in-picture’ of the favorite players.

Perhaps the viewer selects which commercials to come on his screen; what if the viewer designs his own commercials?

(Article: New York Times, April 15, 2001.)

5. WHAT IF:

infomercials become the dominant media?

Perhaps the Red Hot Chili Peppers do the infomercials for the next exercise widget using the unequaled techniques of MTV, which has pushed the frontier of television.

(Article: Journal of Advertising, Volume 29, Number 4, Winter 2000.)

6. WHAT IF:

infomercials merge with entertainment?

Perhaps called ‘Infomercialtainment’.

Perhaps the next Seinfeld TV series is really a sitcom selling a group of brands––Sony, Chevrolet, Reebok, whatever.

Perhaps the next Nike campaign is a videogame.

Perhaps we go back to the future: 1950 radio––the Arthur Godfrey Hour;

1960 Hallmark Theatre; or 1970 Walt Disney Presents––entertainment combined with commercials on products taken from the entertainment.

7. WHAT IF:

each person had their own personal television channel?

Perhaps I have my own private channel, with my personal pre-selected interests, advertising only products I’m interested in from places I’m willing to buy. Perhaps this channel is where I communicate with family and friends.

Perhaps this channel has my family tree, family photos and videos.

(Article on Permission Marketing; Fast Company magazine, April/May, 1998)

8. WHAT IF:

the television set printed the daily newspaper?

Perhaps I have my own private newspaper, with my personal pre-selected interests, advertising only products I’m interested in from places I’m willing to buy.

Perhaps many of the articles are about me or my family or friends.

Perhaps I choose to subscribe only to good news.

(Article on Permission Marketing; Fast Company magazine, April/May, 1998)

9. WHAT IF:

the giant agency holding companies had their own television networks?

Perhaps ad agencies produce entertainment programs for their brands.

(Already in the works, we hear.)

Once again, we can refer to the old days of radio when the newscaster wove his soap powder spots in his news broadcast. How about Fibber Mcgee and Molly when the show’s announcer was part of the story––and every show the announcer tricked Fibber into letting him sell the product? Product placement in films has been around a long time. It’s only a short time until you watch a drama produced by Mercedes and you can click on the car to not only get the specifications of the model, but place an order for the automobile.

10. WHAT IF:

the giant agency holding companies had their own schools?

Perhaps schools like mine disappear; perhaps schools like yours disappear.

Omnicom already has its own university––DAS University, as well as an affiliation with Harvard Business School. And get this: MIT is putting all its course material on the web for all to use––without cost.

(“MIT to put course materials free on Web”: article: New York Times, April 15, 2001.)

11. WHAT IF:

schools like ours survive by forming unusual alliances?

Perhaps our model is of interest to this conference:

We formed an alliance with Florida International University (FIU) this past year to offer a Masters degree. Students take their creative classes with Miami Ad School and their academic classes at FIU. An example of a private school affiliated with a public institution––unusual bedfellows but very efficient.

Our full-time school in San Francisco is in a large space in the middle of an ad agency––Hill Holliday GMO.

12. WHAT IF:

terms like art director, copywriter, graphic design disappear?

Perhaps replaced by terms such as: conceptor; contacter; planner; navigator; chooser; finder; producer; doer.

13. WHAT IF:

Adobe offers a new application with templates for all the possible print layout formats?

Perhaps all a student need do is click on a layout template taken from this year’s winning CLIO or Pencil competition. Actually there aren’t that many possible layout variations. Why not make it simple for a secretary to do?

14. WHAT IF:

Adobe offers a new application with templates for all the possible TV commercial formats?

Perhaps all a student need do is click on a TVC template taken from this year’s competition winners. Actually there aren’t that many possible TVC variations.

Why not make it easy for everyone?

Stock photography, stock video and now stock templates.

Doesn’t matter if you agree or not; it’s already happening.

15. WHAT IF:

writing for the web is done by a bullpen?

Perhaps a throwback to the newsroom. It’s going to take a lot of writing to fill all those channels. Turnabout is fair play. After all there’s been very little copy written in print for a long time now. Writers writing––what a nice idea.

16. WHAT IF:

the advertising job market continues to shrink?

Perhaps the wealth of jobs to be found in web work, DVD projects and other digital media make it worth broadening our educational scope. Pay attention to this quote–– “No longer the last stop in the (TV) spot making process, postproduction shops are turning into content providers.” That’s a potential packed with dynamite.

(Article: Creativity magazine, April, 2001.)

17. WHAT IF:

we don’t pay attention to the demographics of the USA?

Perhaps we need to pay attention to the growth of minorities.

For example in our school over forty percent come from abroad; we have over twenty-five languages in the school.

Perhaps all of our schools need to recognize the increase of the Hispanic population of the USA. According to the last census, now Hispanics are the largest minority and the fastest growing segment.

We’ve made a big attempt to include this factor in our curriculum. We offer courses in advertising products, services and brands for Spanish-speaking countries as well as the Hispanic market in the United States. These courses are taught by Spanish-speaking instructors with professional agency experience in Spain, South and Central America. We also offer a program in Madrid and Barcelona for our Spanish-speaking students. In the next year we will offer a program in Sao Paulo, Brazil for our Portuguese-speaking students.

An interesting affirmation of this can be seen in the record of Miami Ad School students in last year’s national and international student competitions. The Grand Prize in the International Andys, One Show pencil, Gold Clios for print and TV, and Best of Show at Show South were won by students from Argentina, Columbia, Dominican Republic and by four Americans. But three of those Americans were of Hispanic heritage.

18. WHAT IF:

we don’t pay attention to the global advertising education?

Perhaps we need to think beyond the USA.

In October we will open a full-time school in Warsaw. This is a country of forty million people and no ad school and an advertising history of only ten years.

In the coming year we will open a full-time school in Madrid.

In the coming year we will open a full-time school in Amsterdam as the hub of our European network of schools and programs. (We already teach 40 students a year in Amsterdam.) This will give us full-time schools or programs in London, Prague, Hamburg, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Madrid and Barcelona.

We expect to open a full-time school in Sao Paulo, Brazil in the next year and a half.

19. WHAT IF:

schools like ours survive by radically changing our curriculum, our program and our focus?

Perhaps a little personal history. My husband graduated from design school in 1958. When he went to work in advertising every art director wanted only to work in print. The sixties were a marvelous time for print. All the magazines were huge, Life, Look, McCalls, Fortune––a print ad ‘felt’ like a poster.

TV commercials, on the other hand, were bad. They were black and white and the quality sucked. Ad budgets were 90% print. Then, the revolution! In a few short years TV got color and got respect. All the art directors now wanted to work on TV. Ad budgets switched from print to TV. Art directors and copywriters’ salaries were in direct proportion to whether they created print or TV.

Sound familiar?

The quality of the web also sucks. No art director or copywriter really wants to work on the web. But with broadband comes streaming video and screaming quality. Have ad agencies heard the locomotive roar of the broadband tornado now way past the horizon and just down the street? Have advertising schools heard?

This past year in TBWA/Chiat/Day/LA every employee was fired on Friday and on Saturday went to an agency retreat whereupon Lee Clow sermoned the congregation that every project from now on coming into the agency should consider web implications. On Monday, everyone was rehired.

We’ve heard the roar at our school and have wobbly knees, I admit.

Still every student now takes all the web and interactive classes regardless of what they call themselves––art director, copywriter, or graphic designer. We’ve jumbled the typical ad/cw teams and now team art directors with art directors, writers with writers, and we’ve mixed in planners and designers.

Graduates must have a TV reel and interactive/web work, in addition to the traditional print book. They have mini books, CD ROMs and soon DVD’s. Within six months all students will be required to have a web site with completed work and work-in-progress.

20. WHAT IF:

we must change, even start from scratch––will we have the guts?

I hope all of us will have the courage to immediately revise our curriculum, not be satisfied with making the curriculum just current with the advertising profession. But instead, develop curriculum that will produce graduates who can work in this business two to five years from now. In our opinion we are in the eye of a dramatic hurricane of a change in this industry. Advertising will be very different in five years, perhaps even three years.

We can’t afford, any of us, to graduate an obsolete product.

Remember––all the technology for the next revolution is already in the market place. Broadband is here and now. Tivo, for example, by itself could easily eliminate television commercials as we know them today. DVD’s carry so much information that they not only hold the feature film, but anything else needed to help sell the disk. The recent Charlie’s Angels release carried the feature film, plus ‘featurettes’ on each of the stars, other features on fashion, how the film was made, special effects, etc.

We can’t be arrogant; schools are not the experimental research centers for the advertising industry. Instead Madison Avenue looks to two unlikely sources for creative experimentation––MTV and the Porn industry.

MTV dazzles Hollywood and Madison Avenue with unequaled camera work, editing and content. Porn is in a class by itself, way beyond the technical marvels of the Superbowl and the Olympics. Driven by a clientele that’s remarkably discriminating and very appreciative of quality. To paraphrase an article from Arena magazine, October, 1999: ...combine porn with DVD and its unlimited levels of interactivity, unsurpassed quality of sound and vision, the easy ability to edit and alter...and you have the sex addict’s nirvana. All that wank potential!! Creativity beyond belief.

Perhaps we need to add ‘PRODUCING PORN 101’ to our curriculum.

Dr. Mary Alice Shaver, Chair, Department of Advertising, College of Communication Arts and Sciences, Michigan State University

Dr. Shaver’s presentation focused on the changing nature of the industry in relation to the current look of the advertising curriculum and the changes needed in the curriculum for the future. She outlined several changes currently in progress in her department.

The text of Dr. Shaver’s remarks is reproduced below:

First of all, I agree with my several colleagues: the industry is changing. These changes are driven by:

· Rapid developments in technology;

· Synergies between old and new media;

· Changes in media use patterns are giving new impetus to the need to communicate

across several forms of media;

· A need for different levels of audience analyses and advertising accountability;

· Increasing demands of clients and the reality of global focus and changing

markets; and,

· The two kinds of convergence: among media and in ownership.

Our focus today is on what, if anything, should be done about it with regard to advertising education.

Today, as always, we face the dual challenge of preparing students ---- in four years --- for entry-level jobs and a career --- and for a lifetime of work and living.

This is easily said – not so easily planned or defined.

What we owe students today --- and what we have always owed them – is what I’ll term an “uncommon” education.

This obligation – and it is one – means a lot more work on our part and more on that of the students than many are accustomed to delivering.

The “uncommon” education reaches well beyond the “how to do it” mentality. While this could sound like a platitude, in reality, it is a huge challenge.

There is a need for effective communication, development of logical thought and research skills.

Students come to us with educations that have not fostered or rewarded these.

What good is the skill to develop a website if you don’t know why you are doing it, don’t understand for whom, don’t understand why the audience would hit on it and don’t understand what the product you are selling really does.

We need to give connections both to the past and the future by including:

· Theory

· Strategy

· History

· Values

· Philosophy

We need to teach students to value listening and reading. Reading beyond sports and interests to reading for broad background. Reading the unexpected. We all have lists like that.

This may sound lighthearted – but when students ask me about reading lists, I give them some ad texts (Ogilvy, Bernbach), some classic and some general books. Then I ask them if they have read Charlotte’s Web. They respond that they’ve seen the video. Read it, I urge – and why not? Charlotte understood:

· Audience;

· Strategy;

· Branding;

· Promotion;

· And in the end, she saved the product from becoming bacon.

We have a need to foster curiosity, awareness, and motivation.

We have a need for courses that foster creative thinking – and problem solving.

We have a need to teach how to generate on-target messages.

We have a need to foster an understanding of social responsibility and ethics.

We have a need to face the challenges of

· Interactivity

· Internationalism

· Multiculturalism

Students need grounding and focus. They need to come to us with an outside-the-major liberal arts background. We need to expand their experiences and their goals.

In our “uncommon” education – we should tolerate no mediocrity and no arrogance. We should develop a realistic confidence and a respect for accountability.

And that means we must set our work in the context of change

We need to get some excitement about the business .We need to teach students about the business and how to understand it and the many ways in which it works within the business world and within society.

They may not know why they’re majoring in advertising when they come to us, but they’d better know when they graduate.

Do we need all new courses to do this? No. First we need to undertake the time consuming and painful task of examining what we do now in the courses we already have.

Do we need some new courses? Yes, I believe we do.

· We need to include interactivity and technological applications.