My name is Judy Ungar Franks, and I am a full-time clinical faculty member at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications. I teach both media and consumer insight courses in Medill’s undergraduate and graduate IMC programs. I also teach Marketing Strategies for Creative Enterprises in Northwestern University’s School of Communication MSLCE program. Since joining the faculty in the fall of 2008, I have been named to the Northwestern University Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll five times, and in 2016, I was named IMC Teacher of the Year by the MSIMC graduating class.
When I am not in the classroom, I help to design executive education programming for Medill IMC alumni and I also collaborate with other faculty members on research related to media economics and technology. Some of you may know me as a visiting faculty member of the Coursera/Northwestern MOOC on Social Media Marketing.
Prior to joining the faculty of Northwestern University, I spent 23 years working in the advertising and media services agency world. I rose to the executive leadership ranks of Chicago’s leading advertising and media services agencies: Leo Burnett, Euro RSCG Chicago (formerly known as TLK), Starcom and Energy BBDO.
During my tenure in the agency world, media changed exponentially. I experienced these changes firsthand via a myriad of client situations, customer targets and global markets. In every case, the media plans we designed and recommended to our clients radically changed from an emphasis on television (with a smattering of other media for good measure), to a sophisticated combination of video, audio, text and social messages that traversed every screen imaginable.
We cobbled together media strategies and plans without a reliable compass. We relied on established theories of media effects that were left over from a pre-digital media world, and then augmented those theories with data from market-mix models and real-time customer behavior. In essence, we created coping mechanisms for navigating uncharted waters.
When I left the agency world to join Northwestern’s faculty back in 2008, my first order of business was to develop a new media course for the IMC program. When I set out to find a contemporary text for the course, I couldn’t find one that described the media mess that we were dealing with in the real world. Many textbooks still described media as it was over 25 years ago. They falsely assumed that the thinking and models that applied to a non-digital media world still made sense. Sure, they covered “new” and “emerging” outlets such as digital, social and mobile media. But they did so as if these media were simply additional choices to consider when building a media plan. They didn’t address the paradigm shift that marketers, media planners and the media were actually dealing with.
I soon discovered that the problem extended beyond old, dusty textbooks. Through work at my consulting firm, The Marketing Democracy, I realized that marketers were still trying to navigate these new waters with a broken compass. The media world had changed, yet marketers were still using an approach to media planning and implementation from a long-gone era.
In 2011, Ipublished the first edition of Media: From Chaos to Clarity to offer an explanation for what was transpiring in the media world. The book introduced “Five Global Truths” that made sense of a messy media world. Each of the Truths offered a plausible explanation for unprecedented changes in the media that, on the surface, looked like a bunch of chaos. Media: From Chaos to Clarity also offered a new interpretation of how media worked together to create truly exponential outcomes.
When I first published Media: From Chaos to Clarity, the Five Global Truths were emerging concepts. I didn’t know with certainty whether a compass with five navigational vectors (a.k.a Truths) would lead us in the right direction. More time needed to pass, and more media chaos needed to unfold before we could know whether the “Five Global Truths”—both individually and collectively—would remain a sound framework for understanding the continued evolution of the media.
In late 2017, I began to revisit these ideas. Time didn’t stand still and the media and marketing world certainly didn’t either! The media continued to evolve in messy ways—far beyond what was in our line of sight back in 2011. Meanwhile, advances in technology profoundly impacted how marketers approached media planning and buying. Marketers began to automate several marketing functions by leveraging the power of algorithms and Big Data. Would the Five Global Truths hold up in this current landscape?
In this edition, we will find that the Five Global Truths are even more relevant today than they were when Media: From Chaos to Clarity was first published. We will also take a look at how the industry is coping with all this change. Traveling through chaos isn’t easy. But, with the Five Global Truths as a compass, we can navigate the existing media landscape and envision a road map for where we are headed with more clarity.
I look forward to sharing my interpretation with you in the coming chapters of the book. You may not agree with every point. Nor will every recommendation be relevant to you. But I hope you will be inspired to look at the messy media world in a whole new light. And I hope that the Five Global Truths will, in some way, help you to thrive in your pursuits.
Best Wishes,
Judy Ungar Franks