Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Ethan Braden: I think it was jobs, in his 97 address, talks about that. He says, you know,
even great brands need caring and investment if they're going to remain vital and relevant. And
so that's that piece. We always have to balance, you know, true to our core, true to our values,
true to our past.
But what does the audience and what do these audiences and what does the world for that
matter need in the future? And you've got to be able to evolve in that respect.
[00:00:29] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to another episode of the EdTechConnect podcast. I am really
excited today to have a marketing savant that I saw speak at a recent conference here with us
today. I'm like, we gotta have Ethan Braden come on the EdTech Connect podcast. Ethan is the
Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Texas A and M University
where he leads storytelling and reputation building strategies for one of the nation's most iconic
academic brands. Reporting to Texas A&M's president, he champions positioning, promoting
and protecting the Aggie brand on a global scale. Named 2023 Content Marketer of the Year by
the Content Marketing Institute, Ethan's work has been featured in Fast Company, the
Washington Post, Ad Age, and npr, which called him the top dog in higher ed marketing. Before
Texas A and M, Ethan served as Executive Vice President and CMO at Purdue University where
he helped transform Purdue into a nationally recognized brand earning brand that matters
honors three years running from Fast Company and recognition as one of its most innovative
companies.
His leadership drove over 55 million YouTube views in 2023 alone.
Prior to higher education, Ethan spent more than a decade at eli Lilly & Co. Launching billion
dollar brands like Cymbalta and Jardiance. He holds an MBA from the University of Notre Dame
and a BA in Economics and Spanish from Willamette University.
Ethan Braden, it is great to have you today. Thanks for joining. So I want to start off and ask you,
you've worked with some of the biggest brands in higher ed and beyond, but if you weren't in
marketing, what's a completely different career you could see yourself enjoying?
[00:02:27] Ethan Braden: I've got two answers.
First one's easy. Country music singer.
[00:02:31] Jeff Dillon: Oh yeah, in Texas. That makes sense.
[00:02:33] Ethan Braden: Yeah. Well, at least I moved here, right? But then the other day I met the
pitmaster for BUC EE's and I think, you know, being able to sample all of the barbecue and for
that matter all the products @buc EE's might be right up my alley as well. So either country
singer or Buc EE's pitmaster.
[00:02:48] Jeff Dillon: I love that. I love that. I always think I would do something outside of a
screen too, like off the digital, something else, you know.
[00:02:54] Ethan Braden: Yeah, the latter there is probably the better answer.
[00:02:57] Jeff Dillon: Right, right. I was really intrigued by your final day keynote at Edu Web
and it really pulled at some heartstrings across the room. But I wanted to ask you, you said that
in, in a sea of 4,000 plus universities, schools have to be known for something. You know, talk
about having mind space, how do you define that something for an institution like Texas A and
M. Yeah.
[00:03:26] Ethan Braden: I mean, that's been the journey over the last year since getting here. And
the complexity of that or the onion that we've had to peel is there's what we're known for
internally and within the base. Right. And that's pretty well known. And that's where you can
actually even get away, as you saw in the presentation, with an Aggie proverb etched in stone
outside the hotel that reads, from the outside looking in, you can't understand us. And from the
inside looking out, we can't explain it. Right.
If you've all experienced it and you're in the family and you get the inside joke, people can
articulate that. But it was our market research a year ago that suggested that the American
public knows us with the five most popular words that they have for us being football, nothing,
sports, aggies, agriculture, and those are great. Other than nothing or none, which was that
second word.
But we want to be known for so much more.
And so getting in touch with that over time and then also understanding that we can't be the
Swiss army knife of 60 items.
Right. Nobody opens their bottle of wine with the wine opener of a Swiss army knife, and nobody
cuts their steak with the knife of the Swiss army knife.
So in the words of Mark Gritson, et cetera, and that salience, it's like, you know, who are you
and what are the one or two things that I'm going to remember about you?
[00:04:40] Jeff Dillon: Yeah.
[00:04:41] Ethan Braden: And so we've really focused on that over the last year to get really clear.
And the first thing I would talk about is there's three words that come to mind when I think about
Texas A and M and I'm conveying it externally and they go together and that's magnitude,
momentum and mission. This is a big place that can do things that scale across the gamut, but
sometimes you're big and you're stuck, you're not nimble, you're not agile, or you're not great for
that matter. And it's the momentum and the Initiative that I see here. It's the practical application
that I see here again across the gamut that's so impressive. But it's all been grounded in this
incredible mission with 80,000 students and 600,000 former students who actually get and live
and ooze our six core values. And so we want to be known for a, as a place, as a force for good.
[00:05:28] Jeff Dillon: One of the bold moves I remember from, gosh must have been a couple
decades ago was I never heard of Gonzaga before.
[00:05:36] Ethan Braden: Right.
[00:05:36] Jeff Dillon: And I think it was our president, I don't know, said we're going all in on
basketball, like that's what we're going to be known for. And I've heard other schools talk about
this like, yeah, we can, but to actually pull it off and say, this is what we are, we're a basketball
school. They have a lot of other things going on, but they are known as a basketball school
because of this top level CMO presidential leadership thing. I thought that was really cool.
So let's go back to Purdue and I really like this because I've heard of this before I even saw you
talk that Purdue has been known as one of the most innovative organizations in the world, let
alone universities. So Purdue, you helped build one of the higher ed's most recognized brands.
What lessons from that experience are you applying at Texas Education?
[00:06:20] Ethan Braden: Yeah, a few things. I mean, I think again, I had a friend the other day say
that all things in higher education can be solved with will and resources.
And we definitely had that under Mitch Daniel's leadership. Right. We had the will and we find
that here as well, the appetite to want to tell our story externally compellingly and authentically
and richly and boldly on our audience's terms.
And then there was the resource commitment to be able to build a world class marketing engine
and go out and get some of the best marketers in the world and then actually put, you know, the
wood on the fire to tell and show people externally. If all of your dollars are caught up in your
FTEs, that's fine, but you don't have the budget to compete. And we see that in System One's
research right now. Right. You talk about the size of the brand, the budget, your positioning and
your creative. So I start with that. But I think it's that commitment piece. It was commitment to
not higher ed and communication, so to speak, as we've always known it. But it was really, let's
not even worry about higher ed. Let's benchmark on what the best marketing looks like. Let's
really embrace the fundamentals and the discipline of the trade.
Let's get a deep human emotional truth, understanding and an insight and then let's employ that
into all of our external marketing. Consistently, compellingly, authentically and thankfully we had
the support and the enthusiasm to go start it and get proof of concept. And then once you show
folks some results in that space, once you touch and you really get the hearts and minds, then it
was what more can we pour into this so more and more can understand who we are, what we
stand for and why they should care.
[00:07:58] Jeff Dillon: I feel like seasoned leaders like you understand this, but maybe you need
to sell this across the organization within the cabinet to the president that building a brand takes
time. You know, I feel like so many cabinets want results now.
How do you do that? Especially may if you're new to this, maybe a CMO role, like how has that
taken at university?
[00:08:18] Ethan Braden: Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I'm blessed here at Texas A and M in
that, you know, when General Welsh hired me, one of the things he said was we don't know
what great marketing looks like here. We don't know what it takes and we don't know what it
costs. But you do.
And, and so I appreciated the understanding and the empowerment and the autonomy he
extended to me from day one and he has since.
And I've got an unbelievable cabinet and a group of deans that also get the same. But there's
the exuberance for, okay, so when are we going to start seeing the results? Right? And what do
those results look like? So a lot of it is educating. A lot of the time I spend with them is as a
marketing evangelist, as a brand evangelist and bringing in the works of System 1 or Mark
Ritson or Byron Sharp or others to say, you know, you're not going to lose £100 overnight. And
much of our brand building is in the form of exercise or I've seen the analogy now of brand
building is the protein and the activation is the carbs. Right. This is going to take a little bit of
time, but I've got them bought into the idea that the investment is worth it. We've been able to
show them proof of concept along the way. And so then it's more about can we invest and fan
that flame for more and more. And it's 150 year old organization with a whole bunch of people.
We learned this at Eli Lilly and Company. You can't move things of that size overnight. It takes
time. It's a concept of Compound interest.
But I do think those early wins start to show the confidence in your competence and from there
you scale. But it is managing expectations. It's the evangelizing of what we do and it's the
showing the progress to buy that belief that is critical. And you don't have forever to do that.
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[00:10:21] Jeff Dillon: I remember at the EDUEB conference there was a question question at
the end and it was from. I forget exactly how she phrased it, but she had a multi campus
institution and every campus had their own thoughts of who they were, they wanted their own
brand. And I thought it was almost teed up for you to answer this question because you went
back to your, your time at Eli Lilly where you like. It's stepping it up to this level. Talk about how
that answer. I love how you related right back to trust and things like that.
[00:10:50] Ethan Braden: I'm trying to remember it exactly. But at Purdue in particular, and I was
just in a conversation about this, with our system, you know, the tip of the spear is the most
equity heavy thing you have. And for us that's Texas A and M University at Purdue University.
That was Purdue University. Right. That's the brand, whether it's Virgin or Disney or whatever it
may be. And so you have to look at as a portfolio. And yes, of course you're going to have
localization within, you know, 16 colleges and the personality and the objectives for that matter
of the college of education versus our business school may be different, but the thing that unites
us is Texas A and M University. And it's where all the brand equity is.
[00:11:29] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:29] Ethan Braden: And so I think it's that piece of do we understand the portfolio and do we
understand portfolio marketing enough to say we're all going to fall under that banner, but we
have to have enough freedom within the framework to then localize a bit to achieve our
objectives. You know, great brands are run globally or at least created globally and then
localized locally. We saw that with brands at Eli Lilly and company. But Cymbalta in the US and
Cymbalta in China and Cymbalta in Brazil, if you've got a doctor going to a conference in those
three countries, they better see the same thing. Now it may be expressed a little differently, but
the swoosh is the Swoosh is the swoosh. And so how do you help people understand that it's
not about necessarily being different, but actually it's about being distinct and being remembered
and recalled and relevant. And the most powerful thing we have is 150 years of the association
with Texas A and M, just as you would at Disney. Can we get under that banner? Is there
enough freedom within that framework to localize but always be authentic and consistent in what
we're trying to drive?
[00:12:23] Jeff Dillon: So you talk about the 150 years and you've been at some pretty
prestigious schools. How do you balance celebrating that tradition with pushing for innovation
within the brand?
[00:12:34] Ethan Braden: Yeah, I mean, that's the key. We were at the Fast Company Most
Innovative Companies Summit in gala a few months ago. We're going to the Innovation Festival
next month. And our president and our dean of our Performing Arts and Visualization Fine Arts
College, they were asked that exact question.
And I think that is the trueness that you have to establish. We have incredible traditions and
values and history, and that unites us. That's the pillar that we lean back on at times. We stand
for pride and patriotism and fun and family. But there's also this element of relevance. And I think
it was jobs, in his 97 address, talks about that. He says, you know, even great brands need
caring and investment if they're going to remain vital and relevant. And so that's that piece. We
always have to balance, you know, true to our core, true to our values, true to our past.
But what does the audience and what do these audiences and what does the world for that
matter need in the future? And you've got to be able to evolve in that respect.
And so we got to be hungry in that regard. We got to be curious. We've got to be humble to
understand all those disruptors and all those opportunities. But then we do it in character, as
Texas A and M University would, just as Purdue University would, or just as Eli Lilly would. So
it's that balance and that understanding of who we are and then what we're trying to accomplish
that allows us to make decisions accordingly.
[00:13:53] Jeff Dillon: I would argue it's more important than ever right now. I mean, it may be
sound a little trite these days, but because we're in this perfect storm of so much private
competition, so many other ways people can learn, there's certificates we're competing against,
there's now even policy is affecting budget more than the enrollment clip is affecting budget. So
what do you have? You have your brand. Your brand is even More important now because of all
these underlying tactical, you know, challenges I guess we have.
[00:14:24] Ethan Braden: Yeah, I think I love the word relevance. Right? It's. Are we empathetic and
humble and curious enough to understand deeply at all times what audiences need? And as
those shift, how do we address their needs, their motivations, their aspirations, their tensions,
their frustrations? And can we do that in a relevant and powerful way, better than others?
And are we in touch with that? Right. Are we really putting ourselves in their shoes as to what
they need versus maybe how we've always done it or how we prefer to do it? And that's in
online, that's in the speed of the degree, that's in core curriculum, that's in cost. I mean, it's all
over the gamut. But we have to be relevant. Or you're Blockbuster or you're Kmart or, you know,
you're not Amazon.
[00:15:04] Jeff Dillon: You know, I was just thinking of this. Maybe I'll go off on a tangent here,
but my daughter just got into UC Davis vet med school, one of the best in the country for
veterinary medicine. And it's not too far away from where we live. So I drove down there last
week to go to this white coat ceremony. Never heard of a white coat ceremony. Guess they
didn't exist 20 years ago. And I sat through this and I was kind of like, okay, what is this? First of
all, 155 students out of 2300 got into this program. We sat through this hour and a half program,
had an amazing catered reception afterwards. And then I'm like, that's Brand. This event is
Brand. They've learned how to pull this off. This is why we're going to universities. They did this
little thing, like, it's quite an event, but you can tell they've done it forever and ever, that all the
families were there, they flew out for this. And there's even more now accountability for these
students, which have an incredible, you know, graduation rate and placement rate out of this
program.
[00:15:57] Ethan Braden: It's.
[00:15:57] Jeff Dillon: I think it's 100%. You're like, okay, this is what you get when you go to.
You know, this is Brand right here.
It was really cool.
[00:16:04] Ethan Braden: That's exactly right. And congratulations, your daughter. That's amazing. I
saw that play out as cool as I've ever seen. Last April, when I was invited to give out rings on
ring day. And getting your Aggie ring here is equally, if not more special, I think, than graduating.
And so seeing families come and having somebody like myself just break out the ring, present
the ring, but then have the family put it on his or her finger.
That pomp and circumstance and the meaning that that ring casts for the rest of their life and
that affiliation that they're joining.
They don't just want the degree, they want to be an Aggie and they want to be a Texas Aggie.
[00:16:40] Jeff Dillon: Exactly.
[00:16:41] Ethan Braden: And that's brand that'll carry with you forever.
[00:16:44] Jeff Dillon: Yeah.
So you've led marketing teams that have produced award winning content with millions of views.
What's the secret to creating work that resonates at that scale?
[00:16:56] Ethan Braden: Yeah, I don't think it's trite when I say I do believe there is the art and
there is the science.
Right. So we have amazing storytellers here. I had amazing storytellers at Purdue. And it starts
with that. It starts with the insight, it starts with emotion. It starts with the authenticity of
understanding our audiences and what we're trying to speak to. And so that's in the form of
content, in the form of creative, in the form of being emotive and touching human nerves. And
that can't be undersold. I've spent different careers or different parts of my career either trying to
turn up or turn down emotion. And I certainly prefer the environments where the challenge and
the opportunity is to turn up the emotion. So there's the art, but there's a science. And a good
example of that is what we've done with YouTube. Right. You can think you're the best video
storyteller in the world, but you better understand the ABCDs of YouTube for its success.
And you got to understand the distribution to go and be invested in that if you're going to play in
the paid world, to be successful there as well. And so my team over the last year has learned
that. When we dropped our commercial last year, I told them, I said it was, it was Labor Day
weekend and we premiered it during the Notre Dame Aggie football game. And I said, okay,
we're gonna drop it Thursday.
By Tuesday, I want a million views at A and m. We've had one video in 13 years hit 1 million
views.
We had a million, maybe two within the week. We had 5 million within the month. And that video
is now sitting at 25 million. Wow. And people were shocked that you could do that. But if you
understand the art and you understand the science and you make the investment, you
absolutely can do it. And so we need the storytellers, we also need the tacticians that
understand the job's not done until the job's done. And so I think the distribution is just as
important. That commitment as a brand manager, to see it through, not we just hit publish, but
actually to see it realize the goals and results that you want. That science piece, that
understanding that refining of your craft is a very important side of the coin.
[00:18:52] Jeff Dillon: That's a great point. I hadn't really thought of it. I always thought, I've
known this recently, but do something so great, everyone just finds it and goes viral. But you
need that. You need the creative, great content, but you also need to know the details and
having the persistence of getting the right delivery set up too.
[00:19:12] Ethan Braden: Right? Yeah, we've got a great example of that quickly. And that is a lot of
our views are through paid and somebody might say, well, that's through paid, you know, that's
not authentic. And you go, hold on, we're buying the clicks. But when they watch on average
95% of my videos, the content kept them. Right. And so that combination of being able to get in
front of the person, but then to keep them and see average view durations of 80, 90, 95%, that
speaks to how, how powerful and how, how great, quite frankly, that content is.
[00:19:42] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, if they liked it, they probably shared it. If you grew that fast too.
[00:19:46] Ethan Braden: Absolutely.
[00:19:47] Jeff Dillon: So that's proof right there. So the risk taking. I was in higher ed for 20
years and I felt like that was one of the challenges, was having that green light to try new things.
You must be good at that if you're. Because you've got to where you are to have let teams fail,
let teams try things. How do you foster that creativity and risk taking within traditional academia?
[00:20:08] Ethan Braden: Yeah, I think number one is work for the right person. I've had incredible
bosses throughout my career who have encouraged that and they've put their money where their
mouth is on that. You know, we work in marketing, we're not heart surgeons. Right. So generally
speaking, if we screw up, no one dies.
And so we've tried to foster this environment of take the risk, explore the idea. General Welsh is
amazing in this. He's like, let's try it and if it doesn't work, okay, then don't do that again, do
something else. And I've tried to foster that with the team.
There's a little bit of, you know, that Steve Jobs, I'd rather be a pirate than join the Navy. And
that's the fun part, is going after the bold, going after the different or the distinct, that's exciting.
And when people feel that it's intoxicating, they want to do it again. If it's successful. And so we
want to foster that, we want to celebrate that, we want to exemplify that. And then when we fail,
then I need to jump in front of that bullet. Nobody falls in that experience. It's not fatal.
And we try something else. Yeah, but we've got to have the right environment. You've got to
have the right leadership. And you've got to, you got to walk the walk on that. You can say, hey, I
want you to take the risk. And then if you flog the person for screwing up, then that's a problem.
Right. The audio and the video don't match.
[00:21:16] Jeff Dillon: You got to build the trust in your team. Right. Like you shut them down
once. The time you shut them down in a hard way, less ideas you're going.
[00:21:24] Ethan Braden: To get, probably head goes in the shell and it's hard to get it out. But you
want the, you know, I tell all my team I want to, I'd much rather pull you back than I want to start
you up.
And that unleashes human creativity and initiative. And we're here for a short time and we put a
lot of our hours into work. It better be worthwhile.
And so I want them to bring the big ideas and I want them to try the things they're excited about.
[00:21:45] Jeff Dillon: How do you decide when to adapt your messaging versus holding firm on
brand principles?
[00:21:50] Ethan Braden: If it's still working, don't change. The great example in that system, one
work right now is that changing your creative is really destructive and we poop out much quicker
than our audiences do. We believe that, we've seen it, we're tired of it, et cetera. They haven't
seen it. Right. We said, depression hurts. Cymbalta can help for 15 years. And I could still go to
a dinner party or a family reunion and people didn't know what I was talking about. Right?
[00:22:14] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. We want to squeeze enough juice out of our content. Right.
Basically.
[00:22:16] Ethan Braden: Right. I'm tired of the commercial. Are you? Well, the American public
isn't. Right. And in the world that they live in right now, they don't think about us near as much as
we think they do or near as much as we think about us. And so I think you got to empirically look
at these things and you got to test. We're doing a ton of testing right now in a new way,
especially with synthetic AI where I can test things cheaper and faster than I've ever been able
to. And so it gets away from gut and reactions, especially of non marketers. And it puts it in the
what does the data tell us? And if it's working, then, man, press the gas and stick to it because
the change is actually more disruptive than your boredom.
[00:22:54] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, yeah. We'll talk more about AI, you said. Like, I hear this a lot, and I
know a lot of organizations and schools are using AI, as you say, synthetic Personas to test
against audiences before they produce something. What are the ways are you using AI, if any?
[00:23:09] Ethan Braden: Yeah, more every day, which I'm loving. We just had an incredible
address. So we're working on our 2040 strategic plan right now. We had 250 individuals in a
workshop all day of our nine committees. And George Siemens came in and just blew our
minds. We're supposed to have Salcon as well, got sick. That was too bad. But George Siemens
just blew our minds in this space. But I was just telling a colleague, like, my perspective on the
role and the importance of AI has evolved incredibly in the last 60 days and yesterday, for that
matter. Right.
So anything from. It's my sparring partner strategically now as I rebuild the organization, as we
think about who needs to do what job and how that jives. I'm using it as a strategic thought
partner. Content creation or content iteration. So I don't want to give away all of it, but I'm using
it strategically in the content creation. I want our people to. One of the things we're talking about
right now in hiring is I don't. I'm only going to hire those that are AI serious and AI curious,
because if we don't, we're going to get left behind. But I think the most exciting is what we're
seeing right now in the market research space. Right. Like if you look at the folks at Evidenza or
some of the, you know, other firms in that regard, blanking on one of them. But what we can do
now with synthetic is so much quicker and so much cheaper and yet equally reliable that you
used to reserve market research to the biggest tasks or the most difficult. Now I can test naming
in four days. I can test my new video script. I can test the actual video. And we're doing it
cheaper, faster, reliably. And so it's. It's making us better in that regard. And I'm loving that
piece.
[00:24:40] Jeff Dillon: Yeah.
[00:24:40] Ethan Braden: At Lilly, you know, it was a pain in the butt to try to get a thousand
endocrinologists to come in and talk to you. And it was very expensive and it was very laborious
and it was very time consuming. I can do it in two weeks now. Now, granted, I've always said
with students, we can get them for pizza, but I'm not talking, I'm not that focused right now on
the student reaction. I'm thinking about the national public and national conversations. So to
simulate that quickly and to simulate that efficiently is incredibly valuable to our decision making.
And so bringing that into the mix has been awesome.
[00:25:09] Jeff Dillon: Since you have so much experience creating incredible videos, I want
your take on the debate or the idea of creating text to video using some of these tools like
Google's VO2. And there's so many out there now that can create incredible video from text. But
there's synthetic people in here. And what's your thought on using those tools to create
university marketing messages?
[00:25:34] Ethan Braden: I think we, we're not giving up the control. It's here to make us better. It's
not here to replace. And so when I say that it's fine, but at the end of the day, a human needs to
be in control. A human needs to evaluate does it hit the mark? You know, I just saw a creative
the other day with, what was it, three horses and two horse heads. Right. Like, it can be
inaccurate. And so it's got to be an augmentation and an asset to our human creation. But we
can't become just completely reliant on it.
So the final check on that is does it hit the mark?
And if it's inauthentic, that's a great way to really kill your resonance and your impact.
They would use an example yesterday. I won't cite the university that they talked about, but think
about writing an apology letter to your campus on something heartfelt, tailored, supposed to be
contrite. And then at the bottom you read written by chat gp.
Yeah, that kills all, you know, the integrity of the messaging. It's the same thing in video. If it's
seen as synthetic, it may not have to hit the mark that you're looking for.
[00:26:39] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. Down to actually how that plays out, I think my thought is that I
gotta go back and make fun of all the other drug companies, their ads, because I feel like they
have B roll in the background and their message in the front.
[00:26:50] Ethan Braden: Right.
[00:26:50] Jeff Dillon: It can replace the B roll. Right now. No one's gonna notice the horse
jumping around the background. But yeah, if you have a student talking to you about their
connection at the university and someone feels like that's an AI person that's just not going to fly.
So you're right, it could happen. It could come someday. Where, gosh, they really pulled it off.
That does Seem authentic, but it's not quite there.
[00:27:10] Ethan Braden: That's a good point.
[00:27:10] Jeff Dillon: Well, tell me. Like, we. And I saw some of this in your presentation I
loved. I think it was, if I remember right, a Google Ad that made people start crying. What
commercial brands outside of Pirate inspire your work and why?
[00:27:23] Ethan Braden: Yeah, I'm going to ride that Google Ad till, you know, everyone in the
world has seen me present it because it's so beautiful.
[00:27:28] Jeff Dillon: Let's put a link in the show notes to that too, because that was Google
Reunion.
[00:27:32] Ethan Braden: Such a beautiful piece of work.
And I showed Mattel with Barbie, there's a great Nintendo ad that I love with the kids playing
Nintendo as well. So I love those. But you know, the brands that I love these days, I. I talked
about this a little bit in the presentation. One of my favorites is Yeti. And it doesn't hurt that one
of the two co founders is an Aggie in Roy and Ryan Ciders. But when I listened to Pauly Deary
recently on a podcast talk about their positioning and also their commitment to the community
that they're focused on, I just realized how much he gets it. You know, he was at Uber and Now
he's at AG1.
But their positioning and their essence is this idea of we get you out in the wild and keep you
there longer.
[00:28:08] Jeff Dillon: Yeah.
[00:28:09] Ethan Braden: This is a beautiful insight. Right. Of what their product does for you. Right.
It's not about the product, it's about the experience it creates for you. It's the person that makes
you.
And so the ability to get out into the wild and stay there longer with confidence and trust in their
product is amazing. The other piece that I love about them is they asked him, you know, why
can't Stanley just come in and undercut you? Why can't they just come be the Yeti for
everybody? Like you've, you know, but you've invested 10 years in that. And he said, that's the
point. For 10 years, we've been investing in the fishermen, in the outdoorsmen, in the Oahu or
North Shore, lifeguards. We've built such a relationship and a trust with them that they would
never allow Stanley, frankly, to come incredibly and replace us. And so I love this idea of how
clear they are on what the tip of the spear is for them, who they're for and what they're supposed
to provide them. And they stick to that, and they've done it incredibly well. So. And then lastly, I
think their creative is amazing and they're doing it largely internally. And so to build a squad and
to give that squad the autonomy and the empowerment, the resources to do what they do just
speaks to how important brand and that marketing and that messaging and that storytelling is to
them. So we want to build the yeti of higher ed here.
[00:29:18] Jeff Dillon: And you talked about, you know, your YouTube that went viral with
millions of views.
What metrics matter most to you in determining whether your positioning is truly working aside,
like YouTube views are great, what else is there?
[00:29:31] Ethan Braden: Yeah, I mean, we look at a gamut. So YouTube for us, yes, there's the
views, but I'm really interested in total watch time. I'm really interested in the average view
duration.
Those to me, tell me, does the piece of work stick with you and will you consume the entirety of
it or close to it before you click off? So that's a space we're very interested in. As we look at the
social gamut, we look at engagement. I look at per follower, per post, and that's been important
to us. We've got a really avid, amazing Aggie following and so we want to give them incredible
content, even though we know whatever we put out there, they're going to love. It's a little bit like
sending a picture of the, of the grandkids to grandma. She really doesn't care about the quality
of the photo. She just wants more of the kids. Our Aggies are just wonderfully avid and close to
us that we want to make sure that what we give them is also quality. Our brand equity we're
looking at regularly and making sure that we're driving the perceptions that we want against
those. And then the other one right now for us is national conversation. And so continuing to
look, are we in the conversations we want and are we growing not only our placements there in
our media, but are we getting our experts into those conversations? Are we getting multiple hits
out of certain press releases and are we starting to grow them as expert in the demand that they
have in space, in economics, in national security, in food, energy, water, et cetera. So those are
a few of the things that we're looking at monthly, but those are telling us is what we're doing, is it
working?
Can we commit to it? Can we continue to invest in it, or do we need a pivot?
[00:30:54] Jeff Dillon: Well, it makes sense to me. I want to respect your time and give you one
last question, Ethan. If you could leave every higher ed leader with one piece of advice about
branding, what would that be?
[00:31:04] Ethan Braden: I guess what I would say, and I've realized this, never more than here at
Texas A and M is Just how fortunate we are. I had a great boss who told me, always take jobs
where there's enough clay to mold something beautiful. And there's just stories and individuals
just rampantly on our campuses that the world needs to get to know and we need to get to
know. And so I'm really interested in the people these days that are curious and that want to go
find the oil and refine and share with the world the people and the innovations and the change
and the difference that we are making on these campuses left and right.
I think higher ed's an incredible space. People ask me why I came to it from pharma. I love it. I
think we're doing something world changing on a daily basis. I think we're relevant. I think we're
needed.
And these places can be crowded or commoditized if you let them, and they're not. And so I
think the storytelling, the curiosity, that commitment to get out and find those stories, unearth
them and share them masterfully with the world is what I want to see more and more of. And I
want to see people do that with passion and their craft and creativity so that it will make the
difference that I think this sector can. We have so much clay to work with to mold something
beautiful. It just takes the initiative, I think, and the curiosity and the commitment to go do it. And
when it comes together, we make a giant difference.
[00:32:25] Jeff Dillon: I love it.
Well, I will put links to Ethan's LinkedIn and that cool commercial and Texas A and M in the show
notes. So thanks for being here. It was great having you on. Ethan.
[00:32:40] Ethan Braden: No, thank you for the opportunity. Really appreciate it.
[00:32:45] Jeff Dillon: We wrap up this episode. Remember, EdTech Connect is your trusted
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