Two telecommunications industry fixtures—and icons of the offline b-to-b media, marketing and sales world—are going, going, gone.
In a single watershed week, both the industry’s once-leading trade show, Supercomm, and its once-leading trade magazine, Telephony (recently renamed Connected Planet), announced plans to cease operations (although Connected Planet will continue electronically).
Canceled due to “lack of interest,” according to a Feb. 8 story in PCWorld, Supercomm’s demise should not be seen as an indicator of overall poor trade show health. 
In fact, Supercomm has been mishandled for a number of years by its two show sponsors, the Telecommunications Industry Association and the United States Telecom Association. Both TIA and USTA have squandered a once proud and strong brand that has been eclipsed by competitive shows more focused on the faster growing wireless sector.
For its part, Telephony has been much more a victim of changing reader habits, disappearing advertising dollars and miserable publishing economics, but also slowness to adapt digitally. Not the first vertical trade magazine to shed its print body for hoped-for digital immortality, 
Connected Planet has its work cut out for it in competing against e-born Light Reading, which with former and highly regarded Telephony editor Carol Wilson on board, is now, in our opinion, the leading independent telecommunications industry information brand in the U.S. Very few would have predicted such a seismic shift five or even three years ago!
To see an entire industry’s once unshakable primary offline media brands disappear overnight is as clear a sign as we’ve seen yet of the offline world giving away to the brave new online world. We predict the closing of many more print pubs and weak or weakened trade shows before the year is out. In fact, just before I put this post to bed, I learned that Penton Media, perhaps the bluest of blue chip names in vertical business publishing, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today while asserting this step will not lead to cessation of any operations. We’ll see.
Don Schultz, one giant of an integrated man
By Gary Slack Tuesday April 20, 2010
Don Edward Schultz, professor emeritus in service, the first recipient of Northwestern University's Medill School's brand new Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award.
I founded Slack Barshinger as an integrated marketing communications agency around the time of the publication of the seminal book on IMC, Integrated Marketing Communications, by Professors Don Schultz, Bob Lauterborn and the late Stan Tannenbaum.
Heidi Schultz (l), Don's wife, collaborator and "best friend" and Debra Zahay, professor of interactive marketing at Northern Illinois University.
To say I was influenced by these men and their book would be a huge understatement. Their fresh and bold new take on marketing communications was very appealing to a young agency entrepreneur, and it has helped drive the growth and differentiation of my firm to this day.
So, when I heard that Don, who is universally acknowledged as the “father” of integrated marketing communications, would be the first recipient of Medill’s new Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award, I knew where I would be on Friday, April 9, 2010, the day the award was to be bestowed on him.
“It took us a nanosecond to figure out that the first recipient of this award should be Don Schultz,” said John Lavine, dean of the Medill School, in remarks that lauded Don for the difference he has made at Medill and to the marketing profession. “If a school has an ambassador, he is it.”
Heidi Schultz, yours truly, the great man himself and Kelley Fead, my wife, collaborator and future co-author (once we find time for a book).
Attending this celebration was like going back to the beginning of time—in this case the “Big Bang” birth of integrated marketing communications at Medill around 1989. Don had just joined the Medill faculty and immediately set IMC in motion by challenging what I’m told was the heavily siloed teaching of advertising, promotion and PR.
As John Lavine recounted, a meeting was being held to discuss the teaching of marketing communications and, having been invited to it by John, Don said his goal in attending was to be “monumentally mischievous,” adding that there were “some pins pulled on hand grenades in the room” that day.”
George Rafeedie, principal with BlueSilver, Inc., and a 1999 IMC program alum, and Roy Wollen, owner of Database Marketing Consulting.
The (still) revolutionary concept of integrated marketing communications was thus set in motion at an institution that has a history of other momentous and revolutionary times in its past, notably in the 1920s with Walter Dill Scott and, later, the arrival of George Gallup.
Over the years, IMC has evolved to become a strategic process and one that lives and dies on data and is also customer centric in its replacement of the four Ps with the four Cs.
A silhouetted IMC associate dean and IMC chair Tom Collinger takes the audience through a "just the numbers" review of Don's career.
In comments preceding Lavine, Medill Associate Dean and IMC Chair Tom Collinger shared a perfectly succinct description of Don submitted by a Medill IMC alum. “Don Schultz made me think better,” Tom quoted the alum. “I can’t think of a better legacy. That’s exactly what you have done, Don.”
In a “just the numbers” review of Don’s career, Collinger recounted:
• 33 years in academic service
• 20 years in industry
• 26 courses taught
• 25 books
• 46 academic articles
• 8 advisory boards
• 11 trade groups (including the Business Marketing Association)
• 513 presentations, speeches and training sessions (how precise!)
Don, next to Medill School Dean John Lavine, minutes after receiving the school's first Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award.
Hearing that more than 100 former students had contributed comments to the celebration about what Don meant to them and then being told they would be turned into a book, Don asked in true Schultz style, “Do I get credit for it?”
“No other school would have let me do what I’ve done here,” Don said, as he began his acceptance remarks, saying “I have no speech, no slides and no data. I have nothing but thanks to all of you.”
“This is a place where we create the future. It’s a place willing to take chances, to explore and try this and that. A place that attracts bright people who do extremely good work not only here but when they leave.”
Kelley and the always upbeat and charismatic Professor Jim Carey, one of my favorite people!
Don acknowledged the presence of David Protess, a professor of journalism and the director of the celebrated Medill Innocence Project, who will receive a second 2010 Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award later in the year, as “someone who has done so much for journalism.”
He also singled out Medill Professor Martin Block, with whom he worked at Michigan State University before both moved to Medill. Sounding a bit like Spock speaking of Kirk, Don described Marty as someone “who has been my friend and research associate for a long number of years.”
After introducing his three sons, whose presence was supposed to be a surprise but I’m told wasn’t, Don naturally saved and shared his final and warmest remarks for Heidi Schultz, “his closest collaborator, my best friend, my wife and co-author.” Maybe not a lot of tears, but not a dry eye in the house.