Don Schultz Award

The Don Schultz Award for Innovation in Teaching, Theory and Practice of Integrated Marketing Communication honors the legacy of late Medill Professor Don Schultz, who played a pivotal role in creating the field of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) and helped establish the IMC department at Medill in the early 1990s.

This international award is open to marketing professors or professionals who have shown excellence in teaching the principles of IMC and have created new frameworks to communicate with customers and drive financial performance.

Known as the “father of IMC,” Schultz changed the face of the industry. He advocated for a marketing communication strategy that began with an unwavering focus on the customer, adopted a holistic view of media and communications planning and could be directly linked to performance in the marketplace. This was a significant change from the dominant communication paradigms at that time where public relations, direct marketing and brand management efforts were disjointed with disparate goals and little accountability.

Thanks largely to Schultz’s contributions, Medill was the first school to offer a graduate degree in Integrated Marketing Communications in the United States.