Marketing and Advertising

Jacqueline Babb is a marketing professional with expertise in nonprofit organizations, corporate social responsibility, and the intersection of brand and values. She works with organizations on strategy and how to position values-based marketing with audiences.

Danielle Robinson Bell's expertise is strategic communications with a lens on culture, community, equity, and inclusion.

Chris Cahill's experience and perspective relates to the practical application of marketing analytics in specific corporate situations and industries; such as the implications of implementing a credit-offer selection algorithm by a retail bank.

Debbie Cenziper's investigative stories focus on social justice reporting, from affordable housing corruption to breakdowns in child welfare systems. Debbie has spent more than 20 years writing for major daily newspapers, including the Miami Herald and The Washington Post.

Gerry Chiaro is associate professor and director of IMC Immersion Quarter with a long background in business, specifically marketing leadership. His expertise: Brand Strategy Leadership, and Consulting. Gerry has developed nearly 250 team consulting projects for our graduate students.

He joined the faculty in January 2009 and earned a full-time appointment in 2012.

Jonathan Copulsky's research focuses on the impact of digital disruption and innovative technologies on brand-customer interactions. He is the co-author of two critically acclaimed books on digital disruption (The Technology Fallacy and The Transformation Myth). He also researches and writes about the evolution of business-to-business marketing.

Kelly Cutler has more than 20 years of experience with digital marketing and digital media. Her work focuses on the areas of search marketing, social media marketing, programmatic, retargeting and digital analytics and measurement. She works in both theory and practice.

Tim Franklin is leading the Medill Local News Initiative, a research and development project aimed at better understanding the behaviors of digital audiences and finding new approaches to sustainable local news business models.

Judy Franks' research focuses on the supply of media audience attention that flows into the advertising economy. Franks is also studying how self-serve ad portals are democratizing access for businesses of all sizes. Her book, "Media: From Chaos to Clarity" (2nd Ed) provides history and context for today's digital media world and where it's headed.

Neil Golden is an active business and marketing leader with a track record of helping organizations strengthen financial and brand performance. His expertise spans the restaurant/food, alcoholic beverage, real estate, active recreation and online education areas.

Rich Gordon launched Medill’s graduate program in new media journalism. She has spent most of her career exploring the areas where journalism and technology intersect. She was an early adopter of desktop analytical tools (such as spreadsheets and databases) to analyze data for journalistic purposes.

Tom Hayden is a lawyer and an expert in law, policy and ethics related to integrated marketing communications. He also focuses on data governance and privacy.

Randy Hlavac focuses on how entrepreneurs and businesses can use social and community systems to build market share and build stronger relationships with their high-value consumers. He also researches strategies for building business and executive personas that build followers and engage key influencers.

Ashlee Humphreys is a sociologist who examines core topics in consumer behavior and marketing strategy. Her research investigates topics in social media, market creation, language, and digital satisfaction. Humphreys is the author of "Social Media: Enduring Principles," and she is the creator of the Digital Satisfaction Index (DSI).

Candy Lee's work on leadership and the effects of voice in technology are showcased in her research. She also does work on customer retention through loyalty, membership, pricing, display, management, attrition consideration, acquisition and growth strategy. Her focus on sport marketing involves diverse arenas from fandom to sponsorship.

Mi Hyun Lee's research interests center around digital advertising, channels, media, and platforms. She studies how consumers respond to new digital advertising, media, and channels by using econometric and statistical modeling. Her most recent work focuses on consumers' visual attention to ad elements across various types of digital advertising.

Edward Malthouse's research interests center on customer engagement and experiences; digital, social and mobile media; media management; big data; customer relationship management and lifetime value models; recommender systems; and predictive analytics.

Frank Mulhern does research on media economics and technology and its impact on brand communications. His work connects technology to customer data and marketing analytics; particularly with respect to retailing and e-commerce marketing.

Nguyen Chaplin conducts research in the areas of children's consumer behavior and branding. She studies how consumer values and behaviors such as materialism, brand consciousness and health knowledge develop throughout childhood.

Abe Peck has worked in magazines for 40 years as a writer/editor (Rolling Stone, Outside, etc.), an author, a consultant and as Medill's director of B2B communication. The author of “Uncovering the Sixties: the Life and Times of the Underground Press,” he curated Medill's recent series on Media and the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Michael Spikes' research is centered on the practice and pedagogy of media literacy education (MLE) and news media literacy (NML) toward encouraging critical thinking to limit the effects of exposure to mis- and disinformation. His focus is on the design, assessment, and enactments of MLE & NML in classrooms and other learning environments.

Vijay Viswanathan studies customer experience and marketing effectiveness in B2C and B2B using surveys, text analytics and machine learning. His current work is on online communities, virtual influencers, loyalty programs and governance. He has given numerous talks to industry on customer centricity, embedding AI in analytics and enabling a data culture.

Michelle F. Weinberger's research uses a socio-cultural lens to understand the relationship between consumption activities, marketplace institutions, social relations, and inequality, examining substantive contexts such as collective rituals, gift giving, experiential consumption, and crowdfunding.

Yu Xu is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications and (by courtesy) Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His research interests include media industries and analytics, social and communication networks, organizational change, ecology and evolution, and computational social science. His work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Communication Monographs, New Media & Society, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Service Management, Political Communication, and Information Communication & Society. He serves on the editorial boards of Human Communication Research and the Journal of Service Management. He teaches courses on digital media strategies and social networks at Medill and is the recipient of the “IMC Teacher of the Year 2022” award.

Chao Yu is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. His research primarily explores the social impacts of new media, with a particular focus on digital commercial platforms that gather consumer behaviors. He uses big data analytics to uncover underlying patterns in new media platforms that may contribute to biases or inequalities. His goal is to identify effective policies and strategies to mitigate these issues and promote equitable outcomes. His work has been published in high-impact journals, including Science Advances, New Media & Society, and the International Journal of Hospitality Management