Syracuse University Team Members

Beth Donnelly Egan is a 25-year veteran of the media industry, having served most recently as managing partner and account director with MEC.

Over the course of her career she has specialized in consumer packaged goods (Kraft, Coca Cola, Campbell’s); travel (Starwood Hotels, Continental Airlines, America West Airlines and Budget Rent-a-Car); and beauty (L’Oreal Paris, Avon). She has also worked on accounts for AT&T.

Her skill at providing strategic communications solutions built off of sound business analytics, a solid understanding of the holistic business situation and delivering creative, unique approaches to the marketplace has led her work to be recognized by MediaWeek and at Cannes and many internal global agency competitions.

She is currently the president of the Alliance for Women in Media, New York City Affiliate.

She is a graduate of the Newhouse School. 

Before entering the academy, Amy Falkner worked for 10 years in the newspaper industry in both editorial and advertising. In 1995, she was named to PRESSTIME magazine's "20 Under 40" list, which honors young professionals in the newspaper business.

In 2006, Falkner was selected to participate in the Scripps Howard Academic Leadership Academy, a group of mass communication professionals and scholars picked from a nationwide pool to learn strategies and insights for leading mass communication programs in the 21st century.

She is a two-time winner of the Newhouse Teaching Excellence Award which is chosen annually by students. She was also honored with the Meredith Teaching Recognition Award from Syracuse University.

Falkner is the lead researcher for the 2001 Gay/Lesbian Consumer Online Census, a comprehensive study of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered demographics, purchasing behaviors, lifestyle and media usage.The study is used by Fortune 500 marketers and media companies as a tool for developing products and marketing messages tailored to GLBT consumers.

She was a fellow at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. She is a graduate of the Newhouse School. 

Carla Lloyd's research focuses on advertising media planning and the portrayal of gender roles in advertising.

She is the co-founder and director of the fashion and beauty communications milestone at the Newhouse School.

Before entering the academy, she worked as a promotion manager at Putman Publishing in Chicago and an account executive at The Provo Daily Herald in Provo, Utah.

She was previously on the faculty at the University of Miami of Ohio. 

Kevin O'Neill has held positions across the communications industry, including news reporter, award-winning copywriter and creative director, advertising agency president, creative consultant to leading corporations and content developer.

He has been the senior creative executive at both international agencies and creative boutiques, working on such brands as IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Sara Lee, Hanes, Panasonic, Lego, AT&T, Lexmark, Unilever and Bacardi. His work has been recognized by every major creative award competition and he has been featured in The Wall Street Journal’s Creative Leaders Series.

His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Carolina Quarterly, and has been cited in "The Best American Short Stories of the Year." He has also published articles in Sports Illustrated, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Golf Magazine, AdWeek and Scripps-Howard newspapers.

He is the founding editor of "Distance Learning Today," a quarterly supplement to USA TODAY 

Ed Russell spent 25 years in the advertising business working for some of the largest and best known firms in the world. He has worked on most every product category in nearly every market around the globe.

He began his advertising career as a copywriter with one of the most awarded agencies in Chicago. Following graduate school, he went to work for Saatchi & Saatchi in New York City. In 1989, he moved to Frankfurt, Germany as European account director of Saatchi & Saatchi's largest business. The Berlin Wall came down six months after he arrived, and suddenly he had the job of opening a dozen new offices all over Eastern Europe.

After his stint in Germany, Russell moved east to become CEO of Leo Burnett's office in Warsaw, Poland. Though the country initially had no advertising business, the Warsaw office became Leo Burnett's third most award-winning office and the fastest-growing advertising agency in the world.

Russell later moved to Leo Burnett's Chicago headquarters, where he led the agency's Procter & Gamble international business, their second largest global business. Russell was responsible for 410 brands in 98 countries and managed nearly $1 billion in billings. The agency won more new business from P&G during this time than in their entire history.

Russell wrote Leo Burnett's international training program, "LeoSmarts."

He is the author of "The Fundamentals of Marketing." 

After graduating from College of the Holy Cross in 1983, Brian Sheehan joined what was then Dancer Fitzgerald & Sample (now Saatchi & Saatchi) in New York. He began his career working on the General Mills account, developing advertising for such brands as Cheerios. By the mid-1980s, he was working on the Toyota account, developing ads for the “Oh, What a Feeling!” campaign.

In 1988, Sheehan moved to Saatchi & Saatchi Japan as account director on the Toyota business. While there, he worked on campaigns for Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.

In 1990, he moved to Saatchi & Saatchi Hong Kong as group account director, running a group of 15 accounts comprising 70 percent of the agency’s business, including Hilton Hotels, British Airways, IKEA, Guerlain cosmetics, TIME magazine, News Corporation, Toyota, Lexus and Hewlett-Packard.

In 1993, Sheehan was named CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Japan. Some of the agency’s key accounts included Toyota, British Airways, Qantas, Bayer, Chrysler/Jeep, Kodak, Sara Lee, DuPont, Hewlett-Packard and Corona beer.

In 1996, Sheehan was appointed CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Australia. The agency’s accounts included Procter & Gamble, Toyota, David Jones, SHOWTIME, Castrol and NRMA. In 1998, S&S Australia was named “Agency of the Year” by AdNews.

In 1999, Sheehan was made chairman and CEO of Team One Advertising in Los Angeles, a wholly owned division of Saatchi & Saatchi. Team One’s largest account is Lexus, which they launched in 1989, quickly establishing Lexus as the top-selling luxury automotive brand in the U.S. In addition to Lexus, Team One’s clients included the Ritz-Carlton hotel company worldwide, Flexjet and Procter & Gamble.

In the fall of 2008, Sheehan left Team One to take up his new position as associate professor of advertising at Newhouse. He continues his relationship with Saatchi & Saatchi as a consultant, managing the agency’s Toyota Worldwide Executive Board. Sheehan is also an advisory board member of Fuhu, a China-U.S. based Internet software company. He has consulted for many companies on digital media, including Brazil’s national energy company, Petrobras, Comerica Bank and Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest Bank.

In 2009, Sheehan gave the keynote address at the Direct Marketing Association’s Global Leaders Forum in San Diego. In 2010 and 2011, he served as chairman of the Direct Marketing Association’s Strategic Summits on Social Marketing in San Francisco and Boston.

In 2010, Sheehan was lead author on a research article about advertising effects on digital music piracy, published in the peer-reviewed Atlantic Journal of Communications. He was lead author on a follow-up article published in Advances in Communications and Mass Media Research from the 8th Annual International Conference on Communications and Mass Media. He was also lead author on an article published in 2012 in the Journal of Advertising Research on the same subject. The Recording Industry Association of America awarded him a $20,000 grant to aid in the research for these articles. In 2010, he co-authored a book chapter, along with Optimedia CEO Antony Young, in the peer-reviewed Handbook of Research on "Digital Media and Advertising: User Generated Content Consumption."

In 2010, Sheehan published his first book, "Basics: Online Marketing," which has also been published in Spanish, French, German and Korean. He published his second book, "Basics: Marketing Management," in 2011. His third book, "Loveworks: How the World’s Best Marketers Make Emotional Connections to Win in the Marketplace," was published in 2013 and launched at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. He has also written numerous articles for Advertising Age magazine.

In May 2011, Sheehan was named the Newhouse “Teacher of the Year,” receiving the Newhouse Award for Teaching Excellence from the graduating senior class. 

As chair of Newhouse's advertising department since 2007, James Tsao has built the department into a distinctive brand, fostering relationships with alumni and with top ad agencies who routinely recruit students. He has also overseen a curriculum overhaul and the establishment of the Eric Mower Advertising Forum, which brings an impressive array of high-profile advertising professionals to campus.

Tsao emphasizes a collaborative, hands-on teaching approach, encouraging students to find solutions for brands facing real marketplace challenges.

During his tenure, the student-run advertising agency The NewHouse won the 2009 National Student Advertising Competition, the 2009 General Motors GM&U Marketing Challenge and the 2010 American Honda's Media Challenge for Honda's CR-Z sport hybrid, supervised by Professors Ed Russell and Kevin O'Neill.

His research has been presented at national and international conferences, including the American Academy of Advertising; the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication; the International Communication Association; and others. His doctoral dissertation received the Top Paper Award in the Health Communication division of the ICA conference. A study he co-authored on teenagers’ trust of advertising was awarded as a top three paper by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

He has published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Advertising Research; Journalism & Mass Communication Educator; Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly; and Atlantic Journal of Communication.

Tsao won a number of research grants, from the Stanford University Summer Visiting Research Fellowship; the Center for International Business Education and Research of University of Wisconsin-Madison; the Wisconsin International Outreach Consortium; the University of Wisconsin System's Race and Ethnicity Program; Wisconsin Community Papers; and the Record Industry Association of America.

Prior to joining the Newhouse School, he was the chair of the journalism department at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, where he was an AEJMC Journalism Diversity Fellow and a UW-Oshkosh Teaching Scholar. The program successfully passed ACEJMC accreditation under his leadership.

Early in his career, he was selected as a visiting professor at Lintas: Campbell-Ewald advertising agency by the Advertising Educational Foundation. He was the United Daily News Forum Visiting Scholar and taught advertising at National Chengchi University at Taipei. In addition, he was chosen to attend the Very Important Professor (VIP) seminar by the Promotional Products Association International; Freedom Forum Seminar for Advertising Teachers; Yellow Pages Educators’ Seminar; and Direct Marketing Professors’ Institute.