Have top business schools in Canada caught up with the digital marketing era? - Introduction

​Marketing, used to be easy. Back in the 60s of the 20th century, TV was the dominant communication channel. Put any message out there as a TV commercial. Repeat it a thousand times, you get a legendary brand. That was the story of Marlboro Man. 

Fast forward to the early 2000s, marketing was no longer a simple thing to do. Every marketing manager was faced with a million channels to choose from. How to effectively allocate the budget so that we don't spray and pray? Or more importantly, when marketing does work, how do I know which initiative worked, and why?

Interestingly, the last 10 years seem to have announced the end of this guessing game. Web Analytics, helps you figure out what your audience is doing on your website. Quite a few tools are able to do it at almost no cost. A/B testing, makes it so easy to run your own focus group. And again, the tools are almost free. No wonder the traditional marketing research giant, AC Nielson, and its supposedly successor, Comscore, are not performing so well in the stock market.

When you are ready to get the words out, choosing the media has never been so, well, less human. Marketing managers no longer have to rely on historical data to decide a seasonal budget, only to find out a year later that the pray does not work. Instead, they are able to figure out the ad performance through real time data. Decisions could be changed based on monthly data, weekly data, daily data, hourly data, or even per webpage impression data. in fact, some marketing manager positions have disappeared due to the increasingly popular real-time bidding media buy strategy.

Best business schools in Canada maintained its reputation consistently in the last couple of years on the other hand. While some may argue whether Schulich School of Business is better than Ivey Business School, few would deny that they are both among the best in Canada. 

Then, has their education focus in marketing caught up the trend? 

In this series of articles, I intend to compare the marketing course offerings by the leading business schools in Canada by looking at the public information on their official website. My assumption is that if the schools believe they are really good at something, they'd better say it out loud in their website. I want to find out if any course in the digital marketing area is offered, and how deep they intend to take the data driven approach.
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After all, marketing in the real world has changed. So should the marketing education.