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Yesterday marked the official “retirement” of one of the icons of the advertising & marketing world, my good friend and former professor Robert (Bob) Lauterborn. I was honored to attend his bon voyage celebration at UNC Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 1986, after leaving a storied career in the corporate world behind, taking a 50% pay cut and joining the world of academia. I took the opportunity to sit down and talk with Bob about his lifetime of experiences, before he dives into retirement headfirst, starting with teaching gigs in Macedonia, India, China and Croatia. Also, Bob will debut his newest book, Print Matters: How to Write Great Advertising at the AAA annual conference in May.

The following is a transcript of our conversation.

Brandon Uttley (BU): You have been involved in all facets of the marketing equation: client side, agency side, media and of course teaching. Besides the teaching part, which of the others did you most enjoy and why?

Bob Lauterborn (BL): My first job was selling space for the Syracuse Herald newspapers and while it was invaluable training (everyone who gets a chance should take a selling job, for the experience and for the credibility in the field it gives you later), I also learned that I wasn’t cut out to be a salesman. Oh, I managed to do well enough, but I hated having to explain over and over again things that seemed obvious to me, I hated having to pussyfoot around fragile egos and I learned that I didn’t suffer fools well, I’m afraid.

My early GE jobs were as a writer — an advertising copywriter, a speechwriter, and a writer/producer/director of industrial theater, events and what we’d now call multi-media presentations. I was better at that, and I liked the work. I especially liked the variety of businesses I got exposed to, from appliances to atomic energy, steel mill motors to military electronic systems — GE was in nearly all of the basic SIC codes. My last GE job was the most rewarding, though: I was creative director for the company’s 400-person in-house agency. What I learned was that I got much more of a kick out of helping the writers and art directors who worked with me to do great work than I did when I did it myself. (Kind of presages the future, doesn’t it, although of course I didn’t know it at the time.)

I left GE only because one of my mentors became Chairman and CEO of International Paper and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. There I became the client for all marketing communications and corporate advertising, dealing with the agencies and the media people — most of whose jobs I understood exceptionally well, because I’d done them. I loved that job, too, for similar reasons. My management mantra was that I wanted to create an environment in which all of the people who worked with us and for us could do the best work of their lives every day they came to work. Funniest thing — everybody wanted to work with us and they did do terrific work!

A parallel that occurred to me: I’d done a lot of community theater; I’d acted in dozens of plays and musicals and I’d directed 13 productions, including three originals. I discovered that I like directing better than acting, because as an actor I had limited influence but as a director I could make the play come to life as I believed the author intended. That’s a little like being the client managing the development of all the integrated elements in a campaign versus being one of the creatives producing an ad or some other piece of the whole.

BU: You worked for some big companies (GE and International Paper, among others) in a time when loyalty mattered–both to the individual and the company. What has advertising/marketing lost (or gained) with the rise of the “free agent” trend in our society, where companies don’t really protect your job and workers consequently go to the highest bidder (or do the work themselves)?

BL: After I’d gone through the fabulous GE training program and had been with the company about three years, my boss did a literal “laying on of hands.” “Son,” he said, “You will have a job with this company as long as this company has a job that interests you.” And he meant it.

Flash forward 25 years and there’s GE’s then-Chairman and CEO Jack Welch being quoted on the front page of The Wall Street Journal saying, “Loyalty to a company is bull****.” GE really had felt like a family when I was there, but Welch didn’t get his “Neutron Jack” nickname for nothing! It was still an exciting place to work and one of the world’s best “management academies,” but the environment certainly didn’t sound very family-friendly anymore.

Here’s what I think companies and agencies lose when they develop a hard-nosed culture. When I was there GE had a ten-person market research team, led by a veritable guru named Herb Krugman. Herb was a leader in the research field, very much involved with his top-tier counterparts who were developing new methods and approaches. Everytime Herb learned something, he thought, “How can I apply that in GE?” In his drive to cut headcount, Jack eliminated the research department and with his generous settlement, Herb started his own research practice. GE was still his most important client, but here’s the difference: Now when he learned something, he said to himself, “Which of my clients can I sell that to?” It wasn’t always GE. So Jack might have saved a little money, but who knows what that trnsferred loyalty might have cost the company?

BU: You helped pioneer the concept of integrated marketing communications (IMC). We talked about how your book initially came out in the mid-90s, right before the advent of the web. In your opinion, how has the web changed the landscape of IMC?

BL: I’m very disappointed in how IMC has morphed from the strategic thinking process we intended to a tactical one-from-Column A, two-from-Column B Chinese menu media planning process — in fact, I’m right now writing a new book “IMC 2.0″ to get it back on track. So I’m a little leery of talking about IMC from the standpoint of any one medium. But the web — just becoming a teenager this year — is special, in that it really does give us at least the theoretical potential of doing 1:1 marketing.

We had always said that IMC was a dialogue in contrast to the old mass media model monologue, but the opportunities to actually conduct a dialogue were limited before the internet. It is a vital component in virtually any IMC plan, assuming the person whose behavior you want to impact is connected, which just about everybody is now.

BU: From your teaching experiences, how do you feel students are being prepared to deal with the constant introduction of new technologies and the shift in power from companies to consumers?

BL: Students kind of instinctively know the deal — after all, they’re driving it. What I seriously doubt is that many of the people they’re going to go to work for have fully comprehended the shift and its implications. That’s why I describe my students as little time bombs — I prime them and launch them and five years later they go off! One of my former students said she perceived my mission as “to change the advertising world one student at a time.” I love that. Maybe that’s what I’d like carved on my tombstone!

BU: Thank you again for your time and wisdom!

BL: Thank you for giving me the opportunity!

Robert F. Lauterborn is retiring as the James L. Knight Professor of Advertising in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a distinguished chair made possible by a million-dollar grant from the Knight Foundation “to improve the teaching of advertising.” He has held the position since 1986.

Professor Lauterborn is widely recognized as an influential figure in the study of advertising. In 1999, he was presented with the G. D. Crain, Jr. Award (named after the founder of Advertising Age) for “lifetime contributions to the development and improvement of business marketing,” and inducted into the Business Marketing Hall of Fame.

Professor Lauterborn is perhaps best known as one of the pioneers of Integrated Marketing Communication. He co-authored the best-selling book Integrated Marketing Communication: Pulling It Together And Making It Work, which has been translated into thirteen languages, and a second book titled “The New Marketing Paradigm.” In a 2001 survey among U.S. academics and agency and client-side practitioners, the IMC book was ranked 14th all-time among books influencing the study of advertising, and number one among books written since 1986.

Tags: advertising, ge, integrated marketing communications, Marketing, robert lauterborn, unc chapel hill