The flagship of IMC’s executive education offerings provides custom-designed programs for individual companies. Led by Lecturer Roy Wollen (IMC88), the programs provide intensive customized education on specific marketing and communications topics taught by some of IMC’s leading faculty members and practicing professionals. Wollen serves as the point person for initiating conversations on custom programs for potential clients.

“Why would an employer do this type of training? It’s because they want to keep their employees and raise their game as a group. A lot of CMOs and learning and development people don’t want to lose key employees and they want to train their best leaders to be really good at marketing,” Wollen said. “So they talk to Medill about whether we can bring a version of our master’s program to them in a custom way and teach what it means to be a modern marketer – how to build a marketing function, are we good at technology, digital, artificial intelligence, are we anticipating what’s coming?”

IMC has delivered custom-designed programs for two major corporate clients: Abbott, a healthcare company based in suburban Chicago; and Prudential Financial Inc., an insurance and financial services company based in Newark, N.J.

“In the case of Abbott, the custom program was focused on improving their capabilities to market in a digital world. It also was designed to enable Abbott to pivot from a predominantly business-to-business focus to one with significant elements of business to consumer marketing. This pivot to more consumer-centric marketing has been a direct result of the convergence of health and consumer tech,” Copulsky said.

Abbott selected Medill to provide the training after looking at several different providers, said Abbott Chief Marketing Officer and Communications Officer Melissa Brotz (BSJ90). “Obviously digital marketing is an important part of the modern marketing mix and I realized that we had varying degrees of digital marketing capability throughout our company. We thought it was important that our marketers have a foundational understanding across the company of what great digital marketing looks like, knowing that some of our marketers were more advanced than others. So we thought about our unique needs and looked at whether there were any existing courses out there and didn’t find anything that fit our needs at scale,” Brotz said.

The result: Abbott chose a custom program designed by IMC. During an 18-month period, Medill trained more than 200 Abbott marketers around the world in what Brotz described as “a very tailored, bespoke program.” Topics included digital marketing fundamentals, AI and chat AI, measuring performance, channel strategies, creativity, and more. The program was taught in person in Chicago and other locations with approximately 25 to 30 senior marketing and communications leaders managing various lines of business around the world in each session.

“We liked it so much that we said how do we get this to more of our marketers and communicators,” Brotz said. “We got terrific feedback, even from the digitally savvy folks. Everyone had important takeaways and felt it was time well spent and appreciated the access to the faculty. So we’re taking it to a virtual program so we can reach more people around the globe and we expect that to launch in late 2025."

“Medill has done an outstanding job creating and providing a high-quality curriculum and experience. We would consider continuing to partner with Medill for some continuing education and training needs,” Brotz said. “My goal is to ensure that Abbott has the best marketing capabilities out there and that includes company-wide training in certain areas and this was a priority for us,” she added.

That assessment was echoed by Charlotte Tsou (IMC02), enterprise head of marketing insights and analytics for Prudential. That company wanted to provide education in marketing analytics for its senior marketing leaders across all of its business lines.

“We looked at other programs, but Medill’s program was very laser-focused on marketing and analytics. We really looked at what was it we were trying to solve. The challenge for the CMOs in each area was different – we needed to truly understand what are the gaps that they may be facing and how do we address them.”

Prudential held several in-person sessions at its headquarters in Newark with attendees ranging from directors to vice presidents. Prudential now is working with IMC to take the training online to reach marketers company-wide to ensure that the entire marketing function is now trained and aligned, Tsou said.