Beyond Football: How Ethan Braden Is Building the Texas A&M Brand

20:13It's complicated. It's crowded. It's competitive. You have to stand for something to stand out. And so what is that? I commuted. I've told the story many times, but I commuted for three months when I moved down here. And my family came three months later. And I stayed at the host hotel. And every morning I'd walk out and every night I'd walk back in and there's this giant stone sign in front of the hotel between the hotel and Kyle field, our incredible football field. And it reads the Aggie proverb. It says, from the outside looking in, you can't understand it. And from the inside looking out, we can't explain it.

20:44And it is, I get the, and I respect it and I get the mystique and the mystere of it, but I have said repeatedly, probably to some chagrin, that that's bad marketing. Because if we have a desire, not only to have national reputation and national conversation, but to actually fulfill our potential of impact, people outside the state of Texas have to understand and be enchanted by and demand what Texas A &M University offers. And to do that, we have to be able to explain it on their terms. And so that was the first piece. It was, this can't be an inside joke. This can't be insular. This can't be inside baseball or vernacular.

21:22We have to understand who we are, what we stand for, and why the world should care. And then we have to bring it to them over and over and over on their terms. And to do that, we had to start with, who are we? And you get a similar definition around a place like this that is so values-based, that has so much tradition and so much history. But again, going back to the Aggie proverb, you can't just say, well, come down and feel it. Come to Kyle Field. Come feel the Howdy Hospitality, right? That doesn't work when the vast majority aren't that can benefit from this place. And so being able to bottle that, to refine that, and then take that to market with the essence and the spirit that this place deserves is where we started.

22:06And I think we've gotten that right because it's not about brand. It's not about marketing. It is about making that your operating system. It is about the Kuz and Posner when he says it takes 5 % to start a movement but 20 % to have an unstoppable force. We have to go beyond marketing with that. and folks feel that that is authentically them for us to take that to the rest of the country and the world effectively.

22:30Jim Stengel:Now, you said you learned a lot at Lily about this and you applied it at Purdue and here you are at Texas A &M. I loved what you just said and I couldn't agree with you more. That's the first step, I think, in any amplification of a company or growth strategy, but it's hard. What did you do? I mean, did you do in town halls? Did you have a framework you followed? Did you have a process that you learned at Lilly and refined at Purdue? So get a little bit more deeply into it with me about how you, I mean, at P &G, we had a similar way. We thought about growing brands and we trained that and we taught it and we refined it and we improved it, but we had a way.

23:09Jim Stengel:So could you talk about how you did this? Yeah. I always quote Dave Moore. Dave Moore was a wonderful market researcher at Lilly. And for the last six years or so, he's advised market research at Purdue when we couldn't seem to get it right with employees. So we instead outsourced it to him, an alumnus and advisor. And when he came and saw us at Purdue the first time, he said, you remember that brand book we had on Cymbalta that we could just kind of hand down to a newcomer and they could read it and they could get it. And what he meant by that was it wasn't you get it here, you got it here and you got it here, right?

23:42We had built that one firm. Yeah, head and heart and the guts of it, the essence, the insight, the nucleus, the spirit, the soul of it. And so we, I'll never forget his words. He said, if you have the time and if you have the money, you know, we should call Daryl Travis and Brand Trust. And I said, well, let's go get it. And we did. And we went to and sat at the feet of Daryl Travis and his team and Christian and others. And we ran Brand Trust's ethnographic human truth research against Purdue. And it was so rich, the insights that we got to, again, getting to that subconscious understanding of Purdue versus the 5 % that we espouse sort of consciously.

24:19And we got to that heart of it. And then we did it again at Purdue Global. And then we did it again here. And this one was more difficult. This is a more complicated onion for one, us to get into and two, for outsiders to spend enough time in to get. So it was harder. But getting to that essence, and we can talk about why we landed on Together We Stand as a Force for good. But we got to this place of the three words that come to mind for me when it comes to Texas A &M University are magnitude, momentum, and mission. And that combination is positively dangerous. It's amazing. We have the scale to do anything, but we also have that spirit and that momentum that we're not standing on our heels here.

25:04We're a 300-pound lineman that can do a cartwheel. Okay. And then we're, they've got this mission, these values that many universities, I don't think the student walking on that campus can espouse or state if asked the values of the organization here, everyone can, and they're etched in the buildings and they're made into acronyms and they're cited and they guide how Aggies are supposed to act and the, and the cultivation of the young men and women on this campus while they're here. And so we had a ton to work with, but it started with getting that right. And then it's moving into the creative process sort of hand in glove with a firm to say, how do we take the insights and the human truths of brand trust and build that into not a creative campaign, but a true encompassing brand platform that the entire campus can find its place within.

25:51Jim Stengel:How did you, with however many employees Texas A &M has, it's a lot. How did you work to ensure they felt it was theirs? You know, people support that which they create. If you can take, in particular, employees through the process with brand trust, they come out on the other side as believers and evangelists. And if they don't, it's like you're coming home from church camp and they didn't go and you're speaking the gospel and they don't know what you're talking about. And so we were very intentional about building a pretty big working group that had representation across colleges and schools and units, but also had members of the president's staff, also had a faculty member so that they could come from those point of views as well.

26:33But at the end of the day, it'd be hard for that committee and those members to argue against what we landed on because they had their fingerprints all over it. And from there, they can go back to their dean and say, I created this. I believe in this. And you should, too. We got this right. So you need that coalition. And they need to be there from the very beginning so that they can come through the process and get what is at that point an inside joke. Those insights, the things, the deep epiphanies that former students or faculty members or employers say about the place that become emblematic of it, those insights, they need to get.

27:10And we brought them on that journey and we learned to do that over the times we've done it before.

27:14Jim Stengel:Now, you've already mentioned this, but I think the second decision you and your team made was your target audience is people outside Texas, right? which most of your students are Texans. So kind of a counterintuitive, perhaps choice. So talk about that choice. Why? What were your goals in making that choice? Yeah, probably the second most powerful piece of research we did was brand equity the first year I got here. And the two most indicting probably examples of holding the mirror up to one so close where you can see the blemishes, right? Was we learned that 40 % of America had never heard of had no affiliation or association with Texas A &M University, 40%.

27:52And then number two, when we looked at the American population and we asked them what were the five most common words they attribute to Texas A &M University, number one was football. Number two was none or nothing. Number three was sports. Number four was Aggies. Number five was agriculture. I've presented that slide and that data ad nauseum for the last three years and anybody that will listen to me on it. And the point is always, those are fine and there's no disrespect whatsoever to football or agriculture whatsoever, or our lineage and heritage as an Aggie, but none and nothing is unacceptable, number one.

28:28And number two, I'll ask the group, five years from now, what do you want those five to be? Because I guarantee when I ask you that list beforehand, and I provide that to you as the punchline, those aren't the words. It's belonging, it's respect, It's integrity. It's excellence. It's national security. It's space. It's engineering. It's a host of things. It's not nothing or none. And so once we saw that, if you have an ambition for national reputation and national conversation, if you have an ambition for the best faculty in the world to come here, if you have an ambition for the Wall Street Journal to call you instead of Georgia Tech, you can't espouse the proverb.

29:06You have to go outside the state that doesn't know you to those 40 % and the many others And we have to go way beyond awareness into actually salience and into understanding and eventually into trust and thus into demand. And so the last thing I'd say about that is I get the question all the time. Well, your job's about enrollment, right? Are you just trying to drive applications? And I always say I'm probably in the 2 % of CMOs in higher education where I think about enrollment maybe 1 % of my time. 95 % of our students are Texan. There are so many students that have wanted to be an Aggie since they were six and first saw Kyle Field in the backseat of the station wagon.

29:43We have 83 ,000 applications last year for essentially 13 ,000 spots, and we've announced a moratorium on growth at 80 ,000 students. We have incredible demand. I want that similar demand from everyone else, the researchers, the faculties, the donors, the earned media trades, et cetera. And we have to be the catalyst to take that message to them because they're not coming down on tours. They're not coming down necessarily and feeling Kyle Field. So we have to take the stories and the proof points and the enchanting experiences and the strategic presence that we're creating, and we have to change their impression of, and we've got to give them a positive reintroduction, an emotional reintroduction to who Texas A &M is and what we stand for and why they should care.

30:21Jim Stengel:It sounds like an obvious question, but I do want you to talk about why that is important, because here you have a school that you have more applications than you can deal with. It's selective demand for students. As you said, it's there and it's not going away. And I know you can't ever get complacent on that, but I mean, it's been that way for a while. So this sounds like it could have been a tough sale. It wasn't. And that is for a couple of reasons. Again, when General Welsh. President at the time, right? Former president said, you know, A &M is an incredible place, but great universities have great national reputations and great national conversations.

30:58They're leading those conversations, and we were not. That was very evident. And the deans had an appetite, and the chancellor had an appetite. And this played out in our market research of, you know, I've got a book behind me around a former president, General Rutter, who had a faculty member in 1960 tell him that Texas A &M University is a sleeping giant with unlimited potential. I felt the same was the same thing when I showed up here in 2023. This is a sleeping giant with unlimited potential. And I don't mean this the wrong way, but at its own causing. It is incredible to be an Aggie. And it's incredible to be an Aggie, especially in the state of Texas.

31:34And so if you wanted to, you could be insular and you could be complacent. You could have incredible jobs and incredible communities and hang out with Aggies and you will have an incredible life. But like I said, if you want the best researchers, if you want the best faculty, if you want the best students. If you want to not only preserve, but grow the 1.4 billion we have in research expenditures annually at this point, especially what, you know, what's going on in the federal environment in that regard, you better be excellent and salient on the national level. And so people around here get that.

32:07There's a little bit of, originally, there was a little bit of like, you know, they don't know us. Like there was a little bit of pride in that probably, probably a little bit of ego. And I remember saying to somebody, you know, you know, people in Dallas know us really well, but that guy in Milwaukee doesn't. And they said, well, I don't, you know, I'm not sure I care about that guy in Milwaukee. And I said, well, if it's the, you know, if it's the head of hiring for Harley, we might, or whatever it may be in the Valley, in Austin, for that matter, in Washington, in New York, wherever you, in the, in the research triangle.

32:36I want, I I'm a big believer that the product and the positioning we have here, brands attract and brands repel. But how we are positioned and what we are can be wildly attractive to a huge swath of this nation that doesn't know us yet. And all of that brings upside. And so that's why we had to do it. All the things we want and the impact we believe we can have are prevented if we are not known and we're not known for the things where we can make that impact.

33:11Jim Stengel:now the third decision you put a lot of eggs in the youtube basket and the results are insane you know in your first year i think i have this numbers right you created content that earned 67 million views on youtube which is up 20 000 versus the year before and it has continued the momentum. So why did you make that choice and what drove that nearly instant success? Yeah, because, well, a couple of things. One, it started at Purdue. We were very fortunate, especially with Purdue Global, to be able to have access to Google and YouTube, not a small or medium customer, but really a large one. And so I sat on the CMO council for YouTube for years.

33:51And with that, we got to learn the platform. And when I got down here, what I found was an environment that was ignoring it, that was neglecting it, it was probably afraid of it. And it was also a place at that time that was largely playing to the student body and it was playing to the choir. Our Instagram was completely oriented, in my opinion, at that point in time, the current student. And to some degree, I would say, you know, we've already got them, right? It's everybody else I want. But when you think about YouTube, the attention was already, it already moved there. While much of higher education was still behaving as though primary storytelling vehicles or brochures or news releases or basically their homepage.

34:29And so when I looked at YouTube for us, the year before I got here, we had 336 ,000 views. We had one video that had amassed a million views and it had taken it 13 years to do so. YouTube is one of the largest engines of culture and discovery and education and entertainment in the world. It's a place where longer form storytelling can live and algorithms continually rediscover that content and audiences can build a relationship with an organization or an institution over time there. And so we decided instead to treat video as a strategic capability, not an afterthought or support service. And so it really came about in August of 2024 when we were preparing to launch under our administration the new commercial.

35:13And it was the week before. And I said to the team, we're going to launch it the week before, Thursday. It'll come out that Saturday with the Notre Dame football game. by Tuesday, I want a million views. And they thought I was nuts. And I said, no, you know, they'll take some paid, but use the reach tracker and come back and tell me what's possible with our audiences. And they came back and they told me a number. And I said, here you go. We'll have a million views by Tuesday. And it was, I lose track of it a little bit, but the two things I do remember are one by Tuesday, we were at 2 million views, which the place thought was wild.

35:44And the coolest thing in terms of our efficiency was on that set of money that we spent to attain the first million views, we were so efficient, we ended up getting 8 million views off that initial investment. So it was at that point that we said, from now on, content is only inventory if we don't master distribution. And YouTube is where it's at. And so to your point, I think in the first year, we had 67 million views. Since August of 2024, our YouTube content for Texas A &M University, I think it was just this week, has amassed 150 million views. Now, that's an activity, right? It could be a vanity metric in that regard, but there's a few things that are really important about it.

36:23We average between 75 % and 85 % of average view duration, and 88 % to 90 % of those views are taking place outside the state of Texas. This is an opportunity really to drive audiences and reach audiences we weren't before. And those views aren't victory. The question is the understanding of what those views create. And so we've used it to reveal Texas A &M University, our scientists, our students, our service, our engineering, our national security work, our traditions, even our human stories. And so that allows us to go from institutional claims to visible proof. And I think you avoid YouTube at your own peril.

37:00Jim Stengel:Now, the fourth decision you made, and this is related to the third one, your approach to partnerships, I think, is unprecedented in higher education. And IndyCar, NASCAR, Buc-ee's, Dude Perfect, Good Good Golf, Shank Racing, Fast Company, and a bunch of others. Again, why this choice? And how do you decide who to partner with? All of those are wonderful and great and different. You know, I think it starts with identifying the audience and the strategic intersection. And it's not just about a logo placement. You know, the traditional sponsorship question, I think to a certain extent is like, well, if we do this, what exposure will we receive?

37:36And I think we ask a different set of questions. And that is, who gathers there? What do they care about? What does this environment allow us to do and to demonstrate? Is there authentic overlap between those two brands? Is there synergy? And can both parties create more value together than they can alone? And that's why maybe that portfolio might look unconventional. You know, Bucky's most importantly founded by an unbelievable, wonderful, generous Aggie in the form of Beaver Applin, but it's a beloved Texas brand. And it's got incredible cultural relevance and a strong relationship with families and travelers and communities.

38:11Dude Perfect, five Aggies in particular as their founders, six actually in their founding stages and five today. They reach young audiences with optimism and competition and entertainment. And as I said, it started with our Aggies on those. Good Golf is a great one that we've identified just actually recently because they connect with a new generation and they do that through sport and they do that through content. They do that through creators and they do that through community. But motorsports has been a really interesting one. We could talk a lot about that. We could spend a lot of time on it.

38:39But people will say, why are you in motorsports? And when I brought that first pitch of NASCAR to the deans, we did our homework. And what we've quickly realized is there's 80 million Americans that are watching NASCAR. They're 41 % female. They're younger. They're more diverse. And they have greater brand loyalty than almost all the other sports other than maybe NBA. And so it was an easy fandom to initially identify and say, this is that population that doesn't know us or think none or nothing about us. But then it's an environment that has engineering and it has manufacturing, it has safety and it has teamwork.

39:13It has incredible military affinity. It's got technology and it's one of the largest live sport audiences in the country. So these aren't random excursions for us. They're all different doors to the same place that we're trying to go. And they're not transactions. They're acts of mutual value creation. Each partner has to be relevant. It's got to reach people we couldn't on our own. And it's got to produce something audiences generally want. When we do that, you know, the logo is only an evidence of the partnership. It's not the partnership itself. And so they've been so, so rewarding and, you know, chock full of value.

39:48And we're only scratching the surface on so many of these.

39:51Jim Stengel:Now, at the time this episode drops, we're obviously recording this in mid-summer. You will have launched your largest brand campaign ever. and it's coinciding with your participation, big participation, I would say, in the Freedom 250 IndyCar race in Washington, D.C., which happened August 22nd and 23rd. I mean, there's a lot of news in there. It sounds like it's a big milestone for you, your team, the university. So could you tell us the story of pulling that together? What did it take? Why did you do it? How did you pull it off? And I just love that you have Lyle Lovett singing. I love him.

40:32Jim Stengel:He's an Aggie. That's a brilliant, brilliant choice, by the way. But tell us the story of pulling this all together. And I can't wait to see what happens when that gets out there. Yeah, there's a lot there. I'll try to be succinct. Motorsports in general comes because we started to do it at Purdue. And that comes through the gentleman that we still work as sort of our intermediary between the teams and the sport. His name is Doug Barnett. He's an amazing individual. And his wife and kids, just an unbelievable force for good. And he brought us the opportunity at Purdue that then grew. And we had some success with it.

41:01And we scaled it. And to their credit, Purdue University has the only motorsports engineering degree in the country. So it could make a lot of sense. And it was something I thought would persist when I left, and it didn't, and that's okay. But Doug started calling me at A &M right off the bat saying, you want to do it down there? You've got this incredible engineering school. You've got an incredible business school. You know, it seems like it would fit really, really well, especially with the character and the values of the university. And I said, you know, I do, but we're not ready. I've got, I got to, we got to put on our own oxygen mask right now before we can worry about others.

41:33And this is a bridge too far at this time to jump in while we're doing some more critical work. But about a year into it, he called with the right opportunity. And we got into NASCAR for the first time and saw some success with the awareness and the exposure and the fandom and really being in the blue ocean of it where no other higher education players were playing. IndyCar is such an interesting one. If we haven't given away our secret, I'm going to, but I think we have at this point. And that is that the helmet deal with Felix, we learned last year was just incredibly valuable real estate, especially once it went to Fox.

42:06I mean, I get basically 18 couple hour digital billboards on the back of now an Indianapolis 500 winning driver when they go to his rear camera on Fox in front of millions of Americans for a really affordable price. And so that exposure is incredible. And we learned that last year. and we've gotten better race by race of identifying our reason or our reason for being there. I mean, the Coca-Cola 600 last year is all around military and fallen soldiers and fallen heroes and we leaned into that. We recently did it with NASCAR in San Diego where they ran their first race at Navy Base Coronado, celebrating the Navy's 250th.

42:44And we highlighted George Herbert Walker Bush, who's not an Aggie, but fell in love with this place and now has his final resting place, both he and Barbara, his school, his museum, his foundation, they all sit here because of the love he created over time for this university. And so we told his story as a young naval aviator and his love for A &M at that race. And so, you know, all the makings of great storytelling were there. Finally, as it comes to IndyCar, two things have happened. You know, we invested in the helmet. We built an incredible relationship with Meyers Schenck Racing and Felix.

43:14We sponsored the car at Arlington and saw great return, both on TV and in attendance and media and storytelling, et cetera. But then we were so lucky to have a prominent position, both on Felix's helmet and because of the team on his car and his fire suit as well, as he performed and won the closest finish at the Indianapolis 500 in its 110 year history. And as you watch that video, when they go into the in-car camera and you watch him for up a minute 26, have the most exciting lap and a half, I think, in the Indianapolis 500 history. and we are in the screen for the whole darn thing, you know, you can't buy that.

43:50That was one, yes, investment and courage and hopefully hope. But I've been in the Indianapolis 500 18 times before that and my guy didn't win. So this was the first time on that. And it was right before that that lastly, they stood up this idea of the Freedom 250 and Indianapolis car race on August 23rd on the streets of D.C. by executive order, you know, in partnership with the mayor of D.C. And so we made a decision to be the primary partner on that car so that we can take this story of innovation, of service, of our history and our 150-year history now while the country celebrates its 250th to the nation's capital and very visibly and hopefully very clearly tell that story.

44:31And now we have the benefit of doing it with Felix Rosenquist, Meyerschenk Racing, this year's Indianapolis 500 winners. I guess the other piece was that was the commercial. I apologize for not getting there as well. We've made a decision that when it comes to our commercial, we're going to launch it in very visible ways. And so the last two years, we've launched it during the Texas A &M-Notre Dame football games away and home. You're on ABC, last year on NBC up there. And as we looked at the schedule this year, we said, actually, this Freedom 250 on Fox on August 23rd gives us an opportunity to get an audience that's not largely Aggie.

45:03We're not playing to the choir then. And we get a great footprint to launch it then. And so we have made the decision to go Super Bowl-esque and to go halftime in America. And so we're going to release an anthem that day. It's going to be longer than your traditional commercials. And I think that's going to gain a lot of attention. And in each commercial, we've tried to go bigger. The first one was really about being us. The second one, we roped in Beaver from Buc-ee's. We roped in Dude Perfect. This one, we said, we want to set it to music. And we found the song that we love because of the lyrics.

45:32And we said, who should cut it? And we said, boy, if we had our druthers, it would be Lyle Lovett. And so we turned to Lyle. He's an incredible former student. He's a wonderful human, he and his wife and their daughters. And we went to him and said, would you be willing to rearrange and cut the song for a commercial? And not only did he agree to do it, he agreed to be in the commercial. And so we spent last weekend with him doing all of that. And we can't wait to see it all come together August 23rd on Fox. Wow. What's it like working with Lyle Lovett? But he's delightful. I'll give you two, I think, quick stories that I think are really edifying or maybe three.

46:06We'll see. Number one, you know, it was fast. And we went from idea to come to Kentucky and we'll do it and we'll record it and we'll shoot, you know, in a matter of weeks. but I know my team is trying to manage and, you know, prevent disaster. And so they asked the team, well, how are you going to arrange it? And instead of saying, well, I'm going to take this approach, et cetera. What was reported back to me that Lyle and team said to him is I'm going to go into the studio with some of the world's greatest musicians and we're going to lay it down. And when we're happy with it, we guarantee you'll be happy with it too.

46:41And I 100 % trust that and I've heard it and it's phenomenal. So that's number one. Number two, the time I've been able to spend with him, you know, didn't know me from Adam, but the time that we've spent together, he is the celebrity that I have interacted with in my life, where when you talk with him, you're the only thing that's important to him. He is locked in for a long time. He's curious. He's absolutely the epitome of, uh, I think it was Drucker that, that told Jim Collins, you know, be more focused on being interested than interesting. He is so interested in you and he makes it completely apparent.

47:17He's an absolute gentleman. And lastly, he's working as a distinguished fellow in our performance visualization and fine arts college right now. And so he has been on campus a lot this year, working with our faculty, working with our students and to dedicate that, to volunteer that the way he does as busy as he is, again, speaks to his character. He is an, he's a wonderful Aggie and he's a wonderful human being.

47:40Jim Stengel:I'm glad I asked that question. He's awesome. It's a beautiful story. Yeah. He's awesome.

47:54Jim Stengel:Now the conversations around marketing at Texas A &M must be very different today than they were three years ago. And I started the show by saying you're a beautiful case of the power and potential of marketing to make a positive impact. So tell me about those conversations now. This all seems to be working big time, but what are people saying about marketing, your team, now that is different from what was being talked about at marketing three years ago? Yeah, there's a couple things. We've been on a journey to sophisticate our marketing from a place of relatively unsophisticated. We've been on a journey to mature our marketing in the marketing maturity landscape and map or trajectory that wasn't terribly mature.

48:33And so I guess from the start with the staff, a lot of my vernacular, which was probably Lily-esque and that confused some of the people at Purdue when I first got there and that grew, was probably a blind spot of mine when I got here once again. And we've grown through that. But probably the coolest investment that we've made is I think just as of last week, we've now sent 20 of our staff members through Mark Ritson and the Adweek Mini MBA. 10-week intensive program. We started with my executives and we just went now a layer below that into most of our directors and executive directors. And we're at 20, roughly of our 60 or so employees.

49:05And that has opened our eyes. It's created some rigor and some discipline and a process. I love how he describes it as, you know, it's, I'll teach you everything you need to know and nothing you don't. Right. So in 10 weeks, we have grown some real marketing muscle with that. But the probably the most important thing is it's created common language. And so now Now we have common language around positioning, around insight, around penetration, around reach, recall, relevance. We're talking about being the most instinctive brand in the moments that matter. That language is unifying and it allows us to move forward together.

49:39That's probably number one. Then I guess the other thing I would share that's just result-wise, I love to tell this story, but a couple months into the job, I was asked to present to our faculty senate. Believe me when I say at that point in time, all I had was sort of a wish and a song. I came on that presentation and showed them a vision of what we could be. And I showed Steve Jobs and I showed Edward Deming and I showed Seth Godin quotes or Acker, et cetera. But I was trying to set the stage for what it could be, but there wasn't a whole lot behind it at the time. And it didn't go terribly well.

50:10Fast forward now two years, we went and saw what I think is one of the more research and cerebral environments on this campus, which is our clinical primary investigators, the folks that are doing our research. And what we were able to bring to them now is not only results, but it's results that involve them. We have invested so much in making our researchers and experts sources of authority in building the acclaim and the desire and the demand for them and the respect for them that the earned media trust, the earned media activation. You know, they're going from having 25 earned media hits the year before to 3 ,500 now.

50:49So we're bringing our experts who have always been experts into the light. And that has, I think, again, helped us grow much better. We're still nowhere near we can get. But all around, the actions and the results that we are rendering is, again, creating confidence in our competence. And that allows us to grow and that allows us to have more resources and that allows us to take more risk and that allows us to have a seat at the table. it all has positive benefit to it. But it's been an interesting journey to go from a vision to results and results that involve the academy, not just logos and race cars, et cetera.

51:26Jim Stengel:Let's flip into the creative brief, Ethan. I think the first question I want to ask you is you were a top gymnast, I think, as a child, but somehow you evolved into a college kicker. Long snapper. Oh, long snapper, not the kicker. Okay. Well, still, you went from a gymnast to a long snapper. What's that about? Yeah, glad you dug that one up. My parents thought I was climbing on the furniture too much, and they threw me in gymnastics, and that was wise. I did many years of it. It went really well, and then I got hurt. And in the process of getting hurt, I grew like six inches. And when I came back as a 5 '8 or 5 '7 gymnast at that time at whatever, 13, it was unwieldy.

52:04And so I quit, and I started doing other things. I played football in high school. I played football in college at Willamette University. And it was the sage counsel of my eighth grade football coach, Brian Rosette, who took me aside and taught me to long snap. And he said, if you learn, you'll have a reason to be valuable. You'll be invaluable. You'll be irreplaceable. And if you play in college, you'll always get on the plane. And he was right. It was the only reason I got on the plane in college was I was a damn good long snapper and I could get down the field and make the tackle. I wasn't damn good at much else.

52:39But his sage advice of teaching me to long snap allowed me to have a really interesting Division III football career. Nothing like our Aggies here, but it was a lot of fun.

52:47Jim Stengel:Wow. Now, is your family more Boilermaker or Aggie now? Oh, that's a great question. It's pretty hard to not drink the Kool-Aid down here. So I would say we have great respect for both, but there's a little bit out of sight, out of mind for Purdue, with the exception of my wife being a graduate. So they're pretty Aggie. When my kids came home early from school and my daughter's saying howdy, and she's six now, and my son, who's 10 now, but he was probably eight at the time, said, are all y 'alls going tonight? We knew we were on the journey to being aggified. And so if I have my druthers, I say it clearly here, as much as I love Notre Dame, as much as I love Wabash, as much as I love a lot of places, I would love for my kids to be Aggies.

53:30because this is a special place and it does create what we call an experience of from howdy to here. It's a lifelong connection bond duty that I've not seen as special anywhere else. So they're pretty aggy right now and it's easy to get that way.

53:45Jim Stengel:You said your ambitions shifted after you had kids. Can you speak to that? Yeah. I mean, they're the most wonderful thing I've ever encountered. And like I said earlier, I'd work till 10 o 'clock if I wasn't married and I didn't have children because I love what we're doing. I have a mentor the other day who I think summed it up so nicely, Mark Ferrara. He said, where you find discretionary effort, you find success. And I think that's true in myself and I think that's true in a team. If you create a team, you create an environment where people are willing to give discretionary effort, additional effort to an endeavor, over time with that compound interest, you're going to win.

54:22And that's how I feel down here. But when I've got my wife and a 10-year-old and a six-year-old and a crazy little three-year-old at home, my priorities are in check. And so I want to get home to them. And so I heard Chip Conley last week on the Knowledge Project podcast with Shane Parrish. And he talked about this idea that for the first part of your life and for the first part of your career, much of your ambition is driven by ego. And I think that was absolutely true for me. hard charging, accomplished promotions, acclaim, you know, do it yourself. He says, if you're lucky enough and you're wise enough, that second part of your career and your life should be guided by soul.

54:59And I think that's what we found. I think I've found what's important to me, who's important to me, what a well-lived life looks like, what will be important, you know, at whatever age, 85 on your deathbed, it won't be these creative campaigns. It will be having kids in the room. And so my definition these days is a job that most nights I don't work, most weekends I'm here, the ability to be to their games or their doctor's appointments or their school performances, the chance to take them to camp before I come to school, the chance to bring them with me and then take them across the street in a golf cart from Texas A &M to their school.

55:35This is affording us an incredible quality of life. And it's been a really good reset for me and my family to really get in touch with what's important and shed some of that which is not.

55:46Jim Stengel:What's the first brand you remember making an impact on you as a young boy? I was thinking about this. There were a bunch, and there's some embarrassing ones, I think. But the one I remember the most vividly is Nike. And it's because at the time, in addition to being a gymnast, I was playing tennis. and for some darn reason, maybe I can still be, we'll see, I thought I wanted to be Andre Agassi. It was when he really changed the game on, especially at Wimbledon, but otherwise, the apparel. He had an incredible sweatsuit with the best tear-off sweatpants you've ever seen. I don't know why we don't have more of those these days, and I can't wear them to work, but I had just the most incredible Andre Agassi getup from my parents for a birthday.

56:30I felt like a better tennis player, right? It changed me. It affected my identity and my confidence as I approached the game. And that is not rational. That's completely emotional. And so Nike has always been a, I've been a big fan of Nike ever since, but I can remember it starting early and it started with Andre Agassi.

56:47Jim Stengel:Now I want to share a quote that I read from you, and I love this one. It's the contemporary CMO must operate less like the leader of a promotional department and more like a general manager of enterprise reputation, attention, trust, growth, and organizational capability. That's a beautiful definition of a CMO, by the way. So my question to you, when did that insight take root with you? Was it at Lilly? It started there. Yeah. I think about people like Rob Brown and John Bamforth and others, Dan Hassler included there, that I use a mantra that my team knows. In fact, behind me here at a marketing conference I spoke at a year ago, a firm said, we want to orchestrate a little game.

57:30And the game is that we want to create a bingo of the Ethanisms. And so I have a few of those.

57:36Jim Stengel:That's good. And it was cute and it was fun and it went over quite well. And they're right. And my team would tell you and they could spout off some of the ones they like and don't like for that matter. But I remember at Lilly, one of the Ethanisms that I learned there was this idea that marketing is not the driven, it's the driver. And I remember John Bamforth and Rob Brown and others saying, right, we are not the short order cook of random acts of marketing. We are the driver of exemplary customer experiences. And I brought that with me. I think that's kind of been ingrained and that's been in my DNA ever since.

58:09And as you ascend, if you represent that perspective and you're steadfast in that, you can change cultures to believe that. And I believe that our president now and I believe this university is starting to see that. that they see the material contribution of marketing as really principal architects of value, and that we should be materially contributing to the realization of the organization's goals and objectives and the realization of its vision. And if we're not, why are we here? And so, you know, I saw somebody say that CMO the other day is really the chief relevance officer. And I think there's a good piece of that.

58:43The things that we can bring to the table in terms of the empathy and the curiosity and the courage to be really in touch with the market and be market oriented as as Mark Ritson talks about, is our responsibility. And I don't give up until we get that. So yeah, it started at Lilly. And then I think as you build the muscle and you build the flywheel, it's sort of like, well, don't ever let that slow down. Because I think it's right.

59:06Jim Stengel:Who's been the most inspiring person in your life, Ethan? My parents, my mom and dad. And that only becomes more clear daily. I didn't know it. I think, nobody does in the time, but only child. Dad passed away at 61. Mom's here and lives two blocks from us. And I think about two people who made incredible sacrifices throughout my childhood to make me who I am and to make the life and the lifestyle and the opportunities that I've had possible. You know, I remember they both drove old cars and my mom once saying, we could drive a new car every year, but we're sending you to the school that we think you should go to, right?

59:43Paying for my undergraduate degree, the compromises, the sacrifices that they have made and made showed me what great parenting looks like. And it does translate. It is what I want and I'm most focused on with my kids, but they gave up a lot for me. And unfortunately, frankly, with my father, he never got to see the spoils of those efforts. He was going to retire and my mom and dad were going to travel and do all the things they didn't do when they were working hard and providing for me and he never got that chance. And that was a real shame. And so I think about them a lot. and I think about my potential a lot because of it.

1:00:19They've invested in me that and so I feel very accountable. Now that accountability is a little different now as a dad and a husband, but I feel very accountable to doing justice to what they invested in and what they made possible.

1:00:31Jim Stengel:Do you talk about marketing with your mom? Yeah, yeah. I thought about this as I was driving in today. I talk about marketing with just about anybody that'll listen. I think I can tell that. Yeah, you can get me going. I think about Adweek last year with Craig Bromers and some of the other guys and that's a funny story. But no, I was thinking about the fact that when I, I've kind of created, hopefully in confidence, my own think tanks and market research pools that when we do something, I usually share it with my mom. I usually share it with certain friends. I usually share it with my wife and I share it with a bunch of Aggies.

1:01:03I share it with some good marketers and I look for their feedback long before we launch. And so some of our market research is just organic and personal. And, you know, I've been sharing the Lyle Lovett song with some of them and saying, what do you think? Is this a banger or not? Right? Do you like this commercial or not? And it's good to get that perspective. So I will talk marketing with just about anybody who will listen.

1:01:24Jim Stengel:Well, make sure your mom listens to this. I will. I will. She and my uncle in Arizona, they're two. Doug Barnett's another that I get a lot of nice feedback when they either see me or listen to me. And actually, as I was driving in today, I was listening to your episode with Jill from MasterCard. And I pointed to the screen and I told my 10-year-old and my six-year-old, I said, I'm to cut an episode with Jim today, and you can hear it in September, and it's a really big deal. Oh, thank you, Ethan. This has been a really big deal. Thank you for this. It's a great gift. You're a great marketer and a great human being, so congratulations on it all, and thanks for being on our show.

1:01:59Well, you're the very best. You are the pinnacle. I'm honored and humbled to even be on the show. I've been listening to you forever. It was like meeting your heroes when I got to finally meet you in person at Kellogg, and congratulations again on your induction to the Hall of Fame for advertising. You were and are the rockstar CMO. And meeting you is like meeting Michael Jordan. You could meet your hero and you're just as good, better as I ever imagined. So seriously, thank you. And thank you for the podcast. It has taught me a ton over the years.

1:02:30Jim Stengel:That was my conversation with Ethan Braden at Texas A &M. Three takeaways from this one for your business brand and life. The first one, we had a fabulous discussion about the role of a CMO and the role of marketing. It happened toward the end of the episode. I'm so glad I asked the question. I shared the quote about how he saw the modern CMO role, and he went on to talk about value and enterprise growth and culture. It's about as good a definition I've ever heard about the role of the CMO. Second takeaway, partnerships. This institution has a highly innovative approach to partnerships, you know, vis-a-vis their competitive set of other colleges and universities.

1:03:08Jim Stengel:Even if he were a CPG brand, this would be a very creative approach to partnerships. And I love how he talked about it. It has to be mutual value, mutual respect. You have to have shared goals, shared culture. That's the way to approach partnerships, especially in this world where creators are taking such a large role in helping brands find their way and grow. And third takeaway, Ethan loves his job. Ethan loves brand marketing. Ethan brings such energy and passion to the subject. He said if he didn't have a family, he'd be there until 1030 every night. And I think he is a benchmark for passion for a role.

1:03:47Jim Stengel:If you don't feel the way Ethan does about your job, you probably ought to think about it a bit more. Listen to how he reads. He listens to podcasts. He reads books. He goes to conferences. He is always seeking to learn more about his discipline. And it shows in the results that he has delivered at three different institutions.