Sanford Bredine
Notable Quote
“New York is Wall Street and the Financial Capital of the United States. Chicago is the marketplace of America. It’s where in the 19th century, companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward built retail empires marketing directly to residents of the Great Plains. It’s where Armor and Swift made Chicago the “hog butcher to the world”. It’s where great companies like Kraft, Quaker Oats and Motorola became household names with the help of such 20th century advertising icons as Leo Burnett and Fairfax Cone, who created a uniquely Chicago style of advertising. It’s also where the pioneers of audience measurement and product movement research, like A.C. Nielsen and Information Resources, got their start. Simply stated, Chicago is a city that gets down to business and makes things happen.”
Notable Vignette
Most of my experience comes from working in the industry for over 30 years. I spent 20 years working for some of the major advertising agencies in Chicago before opening my own Marketing and Design firm. In hindsight, I am very thankful that my first agency was a business-to-business agency. Because the budgets were smaller, it operated on a copy-contact system, which meant that as the Account Executive, I also had to write the copy for the advertising. It was a great discipline in listening and understanding your client and doing extensive research on the product you were advertising. It also helped me discover that I was much more creative than I ever realized. Ultimately, this background led to a more exciting career, sometimes directing large account handling groups and sometimes as Executive Creative Director for an agency.
What excites me about Stuart
Stuart is not a large impersonal school. I personally get to know all the students in the Marketing Communication program. I work closely with them to ensure that they are taking the right mix of courses to satisfy both our degree requirements, but more importantly, their career goals. I want to make sure they have the right mix of analytic and critical thinking skills that will follow them through their career, combined with the state of the art tactical skills that they can put to use immediately upon graduation.
But the most exciting thing of all is when a student comes up to me and says, “Nobody knows how good this program really is!”
My Teaching Philosophy
I believe you learn more from “doing” than from a textbook or listening to an instructor. In the world of marketing, “no one is an island”. For marketing efforts to function seamlessly, it requires the contributions and coordination of a lot of participants. I don’t think I can prepare students for a career in marketing without training them how to be an effective “team member”. That’s why most of the Marketing Communication courses include team projects.
My Teaching/Research Interests
In my role as Program Director, I am constantly in search of new technologies and new applications that can be applied to Marketing Communication. Currently I am exploring how we can introduce more Marketing Analytics, a rapidly growing field, into our curriculum. I am always on the look-out for leading edge professionals to be guest speakers in our classes, and occasionally to teach a new class.
And always, I am in touch with a number of companies to provide “real world” assignments for our classes. This could be as small as a multiple week project, or as long as the Practicum, where teams spend the entire semester competing on an assignment a client presents to them. I feel the more “real world” we can make the learning experience, the more readily students learn. And that is born out by many students’ responses to the Practicum, many of which comment, “I learned more in that one course than in all the others I took in the program.”
