Experience before Ivy
Author: cindyr
As seen in the spring 2025 Ivy magazine.
Gwen Friedow is making her pitch to a classroom full of engineering and marketing students.
Her pitch is all about the pitch – everything a budding entrepreneur needs to do to launch a new product or service and, most importantly, entice potential investors.
Friedow (’85 journalism and mass communication) is a marketing lecturer at the Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business. A farm kid from Kanawha, Iowa, her original plan was to be an agriculture journalist. That changed when an advertising class made her think that “it’s really cool to have the ability to influence and create change for businesses and people.”
An internship with an agency that worked with the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) in Des Moines, Iowa, led to her first job as ad manager for the NPPC. It was a perfect fit for a marketing-minded young woman with a farm background.
“I got to see all aspects of marketing – consumer advertising, the retail and restaurant trade, and producer relations. It offered a great picture of what marketing can do for an organization,” she said.
Friedow was part of the team that helped create and launch the NPPC’s legendary “Pork: The Other White Meat” ad campaign of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
She worked in Dallas, Texas, for most of the 1990s, running an advertising and marketing firm. From 1998–2020, she worked at a major firm in Chicago, Illinois, starting as an account supervisor and ultimately becoming a chief strategy officer. Some of her clients included Kellogg’s and the Chicago Cubs.
Fatefully, an opportunity to work with the Pork Industry’s marketing arm, now the National Pork Board (NPB), came around again.
“Tastes had changed and comparing pork to chicken wasn’t going to cut it anymore. We told them, ‘You’ve got the wrong target, and it is time to retire that tagline,’” she said.
Her firm won the contract and helped the NPB launch a highly effective campaign focusing on the juiciness, tenderness, and versatility of pork.
“Having had that client experience, I have empathy on the agency side for that partner who has to make decisions about their brand,” she said. “When collaboration pays off, you can build a brand that can make a business move forward.”
Friedow always planned to return to Iowa.
She launched her own consulting business and before moving back, she started working with CYstarters, an 11-week summer program providing mentorship, funding, and resources to turn students’ entrepreneurial aspirations into reality. It is coordinated through the Iowa State University Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship, which is part of the Ivy College of Business. During the program, students are paid interns for their own startup company or business venture idea.
“We love Gwen,” said Judi Eyles, director of the Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship. “We first invited her to provide a marketing session for our summer CYstarters students, and she quickly became a regular presenter. She has helped with one-on-one mentoring of student and faculty entrepreneurs, judged our many pitch competitions, and delivered sessions for veterans who are entrepreneurs. Gwen speaks from incredible practical experience, and she is super engaging in a classroom setting.”
Friedow teaches three business courses, including New Product Marketing, which she co-developed and instructs with Dave Sly, a College of Engineering teaching professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering.
“I want them to learn these things about managing a brand and put them to use in the right way. I think of myself less as their teacher than their first boss.”
— Gwen Friedow, marketing lecturer
Engineering and marketing majors in the course develop ideas for new products and services. With Friedow and Sly’s guidance, they learn about production, finances, consumer research, and how to create a succinct pitch for their idea that prompts interest and emotional response.
Sean Dillon and Ashanni Brooks, both senior marketing majors, are members of a team developing “JobSwipe,” a recruiting tool that aims to be the first step in introduction between applicants and recruiters.
“Gwen’s experience and breadth of knowledge has been invaluable in our class,” said Dillon “With her previous experience working with marketing firms, her ability to help us quantify what our smallest viable market is, then work out how to conceptually grow our business off of that has been instrumental to our success.”
Brooks added, “It is clear from how she has our class set up that everything we are learning is something we will need to think about if we want to create a new product or be on a new product team.”
Judging from those comments, Friedow is clearly landing the pitch. This generation of students, raised on social media, is benefiting Friedow as well.
“They keep me fresh and current,” she said.
July 11, 2025
