How To Take Big Brand Swings (like NASCAR, Indy 500 and SXSW) with R. Ethan Braden, CMO of Texas A&M University

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1:32So come and check us out, see this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit five. That's zoom.com slash exit five. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

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2:52One, two, three, four, exit. One, two, three, four, exit. Hey, my guest on this episode is Ethan Braden. He is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Texas A &M. He reports into the president there. They have a team of 70 people across five pillars in marketing. He's been a member of our community. We got to know each other at Drive. And this is a really fun and interesting and different episode because he's not a B2B marketer. But when you listen to this, you'll see how many of the things that he's doing are the same as you. You just have to know where to look. We talk about changing brand perception.

3:30And really, they don't have an admissions problem. They don't need more students. And so how do they change the perception of their brand? He's a master at that. Before this, he was CMO at Purdue University and came up through marketing at Eli Lilly. I've gotten to know him over the last couple of weeks. This was one of those podcasts that made me realize why I like marketing. a little bit less tactical, more about the strategy, but I think you're really going to enjoy this episode if you like our stuff at Exit 5. So here's my conversation with Ethan Brayden. All right, Ethan Brayden, good morning.

4:01Where are you at? Are you in the office? Are you on the office right now? Good morning. I'm on campus. You're on campus. I'm excited to have you on because we had a lovely, I didn't see you after I sat with you for like an hour. We had a great chat at dinner at our event, and then we were gone doing our separate things. But it was great to hang out with you. I'm happy to have you on the pod. My guest is Ethan Bray, and he is the chief marketing officer at Texas A &M University. Right out of the bat, what the heck is the CMO of a major institution in the higher education space doing all my podcasts about B2B marketing, sir?

4:36You tell me. I don't know. No, I want you to answer. I want you to answer, because you have a smart way of explaining how this all ties together. But give me your short answer to that before we hop in? Well, first of all, I've admired you and studied you and quoted you for many years. So let's start with that. Well, I'm going to be quoting you back now. I know all the things you're doing. So you've been in my slide deck for a long time. So maybe we'll get to that. But no, I think we have a fascinating marketing challenge in higher education at Texas A &M University in general. We're one of 4000 universities in the United States.

5:07So it's a complicated, complex, often commoditized marketplace. And you got to be distinct to compete today for not only students, but every other audience that we care about. And so how do you do that? How do you do that successfully? And how do you do that with 150 year old brand? So we sat next to each other at dinner at our event in Vermont called Drive. I have a bunch of these topics we're gonna get into and explain for everybody today. But I left that conversation like kind of like punching you in the arm, being like, dude, why don't the companies we talk to, you know, SaaS brands, tech companies, why don't other B2B companies take this approach where you're kind of taking bigger swings?

5:43And I think one of the interesting challenges is I don't know what the actual numbers here. We have it in our deck. You told us this. We have 85 ,000 applicants for 15 ,000 seats annually. So your issue is not growth. Correct. You're working on this perception change. Can you kind of tee this up for us? Like what's the challenge that you're working on as the marketing leader at Texas A &M if it's not about getting more butts in seats? Yeah, I'm in a special place, right? I'd say I'm in the like one or 2 % of CMOs in higher education. And the misnomer, when I talk to people that don't know it tremendously well, we'll say, well, you know, is it about student enrollment?

6:19It's around recruitment, et cetera. I quickly say, no, not necessarily here. To your point, we've got this unbelievable demand, largely of Texans. But after 150 years and 600 ,000 former students, you know, there's been students that wanted to go here since they were six and they bleed maroon. But we've got, you know, faculty, we've got our administration, we've got our former students, we've got our students, et cetera. We've got a host of other audiences that we care about that I want to demand A &M and be enchanted by A &M equally as powerfully as the students are. I want the federal government to come here with its needs and its discovery needs for the rest of eternity, right?

6:56Instead of calling our competitors. I want companies to do the same. I want them to hire our students. I want them to bring research partnerships. I want them to bring their business here. I want the Wall Street Journal to call my 4 ,500 expert faculty on semiconductors and E. coli and wildfires and you name it. And so that same salience and demand that we have with students, I need with all of the other audiences to have the greatest impact that I know Texas A &M could have on the nation and on the world. Okay. So how do you do that? Where do you start? You have a team of 70 people across five pillars, brand, digital, earned media PR crisis issues and creative.

7:33You have this 150-year-old brand. There's, you know, 600 ,000 former students, 82 ,000 students now. How do you move one of these chess pieces forward? And I kind of want to get into this as to like, one thing I like to ask the marketing leaders is like, it's great to have these ideas, but how do you go and actually put them in play? Do you think in themes and campaigns and, hey, for the first three months of the year, we're going to do this? Like, I would love to crack into how do you go and move this thing forward a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple pieces that start it. One was the charge.

8:02So coming down here, the charge from my former president was a simple four words. It was national reputation and national conversation. Most people in Texas have heard of Texas A &M University and have some opinion of it. But 25 to 40 % of America have never heard of or at least have no opinion of Texas A &M University. So you can be this regional, you know, salient powerhouse often known for ag and football. But when you get outside the state, the first piece is like, well, who do we care about? And that's an understanding of our audiences, right? National conversation. Those four words, I'm glad you brought this up because so many of the people in our community right now are, you know, execs are going through planning for 2027.

8:43And people are asking about how do I set goals? You know, what's the right stuff to focus on? And I, I've seen this long enough now where it's like, we always default to the goals are like, not in your world, but you know, you know this world, but like, we need to add a hundred new customers and deliver, you know, 10 million in new pipeline. But this mission, I've seen this at other companies. I was at Drift, I was at HubSpot. The execs at those companies, they had something more that was like, the goal is not necessarily just a number goal. It's more of like this four word mantra that you got from the leader of the org.

9:15And that almost then sets in motion what you're going to go do from a marketing standpoint and gives you more to talk about from marketing. You know what I'm getting at? 100%. You know, he set this when I came down and I think you have this in the notes, but this idea of higher education can either be this incredible marketing training grant, or if it's not prioritized, if it's not invested in, if it's not understood, then it can actually be a place for good marketers to stagnate. And that's because there's not a lot of iron on iron of marketers making each other better. And we're trying to improve that, obviously.

9:43But for years, this was a place that was pretty, it had an appetite to tell its story, I suppose, but it wasn't. And it was insular in the respect of if you didn't know, you didn't know. And we needed to turn that around and say, if you have the desire to be not just the best university in the nation, but the best university for the nation, then the nation has to know us and we have to be on their terms and we have to understand what they want and need, not only from our students, but from our research as well. And then we have to appeal to that. We can't be ignored. We have to be impossible to ignore and we have to be easy to understand and demand.

10:15And so as soon as we understood our audiences, who they are and what they need, then that can orient my marketing contribution to all of that. Yeah. So this is cool. So you have in 2024, 40 % of America had never heard of or had no opinion of Texas A &M. The top words were football. I think you quizzed me on this at dinner and I said, Johnny Manziel, it's not in here. The top words are football, nothing or none, sports, Aggies, agriculture. This is all true, but radically incomplete. And so our job was not to invent a different Texas A &M. It was to make the real Texas A &M impossible to ignore and easier to understand.

10:50Take me into some of the big bets you've made. You've done a bunch of interesting things. It's not about running more targeted AdWords campaigns. You've taken some big swings at this, my friend. Let's dig into some of those. Yeah. So I think the first one was we needed an insight-based, distinct brand platform, not for the sake of marketing, but to actually give the place and operating system as to who we are, what do we stand for, and why should people care? And if I can create not just an orchestra of my 70-person department, but if I can get the entire campus to believe that that's authentic and that's defining of us, then we create a common language that we can tell the world 1 ,000 times instead of telling the world 1 ,000 things one time, right?

11:34So the brand platform allowed us to get to this insight of who are we and where do we exist in our positioning? That was number one. What does that mean, the brand platform? Is that like the messaging that you ended up coming up with? It was our positioning. It was our messaging. It's our character. It's all of our creative identity, all of it, right? It's the entirety of that work mat that we have to work with and all the distinctive brand assets that we have to take to the market and be consistent and also be really compelling. And did you do that when you joined? Was that an early initiative?

12:02Yeah, that was year one. Did the same thing at Purdue Global beforehand. Did the same thing at Purdue University beforehand. Okay, this is funny because we have this little trope that I think is partially a bit, but sometimes true. People often say, oh, the new CMO should never come in and redo the brand and redo the website. But I'm also kind of feeling like, but sometimes you kind of need to do that. And that's what you did here, right? Would you push back on that? Well, I think it depends on if you have it or not, right? So I don't have to change the absolute bottle. There's other higher education institutions that have had their platform, something they stand for, a common language, a compelling reason to believe in them for years.

12:39This place didn't have that. So if you don't have it, you're going to have to. If you have it and it's working, I don't need to throw that out. But for us, we didn't. And I believe in any position, whether that Lilly or Purdue, et cetera. We've got to have some form of a, not just a tagline, not just a logo. We need to have an identity. We have to understand what's in character for us. And I need to get everyone singing that same tune that allows us to do it. What's the identity for most of our listeners are probably not don't bleed Texas A &M. They don't know all the ins and outs. They will after this.

13:11What's the summary of the deliverable there? Yeah. It's easily articulated by saying at Texas A &M together we stand as a force for good. And those are hardworking words. There's a togetherness here. There's a duty. There's a common bond. There's a we before me. There's the 12th man, the idea that at any time an Aggie is willing to go into the game, for instance, and contribute. So that's the together we stand. And with 38 ,000 students standing at every football game, 15 ,000 larger than the next closest school, we have this spirit of together we do something. The second piece of that is the force for good.

13:45And I build that on three words. I build that on magnitude, I build that on momentum, and I build that on mission. This idea that this place is a force, 82 ,000 students, 1.5 billion last year in research, 650 ,000 former students across the United States and the world. We are a force, but when we unify that force towards something, we use two words when it comes to defining the good. It's one, we've been here for 150 years. There's a permanence. There's also an altruism. This place is about contributing to the greater good. We're a land grant university. We were created to bring education to the masses.

14:18And so our contributions need to be something of impact, of consequence, of contribution to our state, to our nation and beyond. I'm fired up right now. I don't know why. Good. Come on down. A mentor of mine put me on really studying like Mark Benioff, right? And it was like, notice how one example of this for every day, I don't know if they still do this, Every day for like 20 years, Salesforce ran this ad in the front page of the Wall Street Journal that was like the market share of the Salesforce CRM. And, you know, we learned about the importance of nailing this one. It's not always about having like the sexiest or craziest or coolest message.

14:58It's about the ability to like repeat it over and over and over. And it seems like that's a similar thing where like, man, I come from this. We talk to so many folks in our world where it's like, we're changing things every month and every quarter, and it's impossible to actually make progress without doing that. There's some value in picking a lane and going here. Yeah, I mean, and if you look at the greats, right, if we look at, you know, nothing runs like a deer, that's a commitment to predictability and sustainability and performance, right? If you look at Yeti, we get you out in the wild and keep you there longer.

15:29That tells me what your product and your whole ethos is, right? The few, the proud, the Marines. I have an ambition here that at some point we will position the idea of Aggie as powerfully as you have when I say the word Marine. When you hear an Aggie, you're going to hear this person, this values-based leader of character at mass, at scale, right? We need to know what we stand for and we need to consistently take that to the market. Do you study this? Do you actively study this stuff, these brands, or is it just a consumer where you're kind of always looking for these examples? I love it, man.

16:02And I mean, look at the shelves behind me, right? I said on a recent appearance that, you know, if I didn't have a wonderful wife and family, I could work till 10 o 'clock at night, every night on this. And I consume it, whether it's on LinkedIn or it's on Twitter, it's Substack, or it's your podcast or it's Stingles or whomever, right? I'm a consumer. I'm a student. I'm interested. I'm curious. And I've got a wonderful mentor who said the other day that where you find discretionary effort, you find success. And I think that's true of me. I think that's true of my team, et cetera. If you're willing to pour in long enough, consistently enough, right?

16:31Naval Ravikant says, find a job where it's play to you and work to others. To me, this is play. It's brain candy. I love it. Yeah, I think there's a common theme to a lot of the smart marketing folks and really just business people in general that I've gotten to know, which is like this pattern matching around reading and consuming and learning. I mean, even just in five minutes right now, you are like a fountain of quotes. And I think that the great marketers that I've interviewed on this podcast are like obsessed with, it's not like you're trying to study marketing, but it's like once your brain is turned on to kind of seeing everything as marketing, then you do see like, oh yeah, I've actually, I've never thought of that.

17:12My best friend is a Marine, but I've never thought of the few, the proud, the Marines, like that word there. That's also like repetition, like rules of three, the few, the proud, that's three on purpose, right? You can see it in anything once you know to look for it. But yeah, I think there's something really unique about and powerful about distinction, right? We want to be distinct. We want to be demanded. I don't want to work on a dog of a product. I want to bring it to market and then enchant people with it. I kind of pour into brands that way. And this place is ample in the opportunity to pour into it.

17:42I'm taking a different direction from our notes. I'll get back to you in a second, but just made me think, can you advice to people that are listening to this? I would say the majority of the people that listen to this podcast are different than you in that they're not, you know, CMO of a major institution in higher ed. A lot of them are, you know, working at a company selling a cybersecurity product or fintech software. Is there some element to like, do you feel like those brands, there's an opportunity out there to play a bit bigger right now where we're just getting caught up in the AI slop and everybody's doing the same where we'll talk about some of the things you've done in marketing in a minute.

18:14But if this is who you are, doesn't it make your skin crawl seeing the way so many people are doing marketing right now? Yeah. I mean, I just try to look for the good in it, but I just think life is short, right? So if that's your product, pour into it and make it the best, make it demanded. You know, winners focus on winning and losers focus on winners. I want to win, right? So I've had antidepressants. I've had pain drugs. I've had diabetes drugs. I've had universities. I've had an online university for working adults that used to be Kaplan, right? If you're going to put yourself into it, I think you give it your all.

18:45And if you're not loving it, go do something else because life is short. Oh, this is a good transition. So you spent 11 years at, or 10 years at Eli Lilly, you know, the, what is it? Drug manufacturer? How do you say that? Big medicine pharmaceutical company. Big medicine pharmaceutical company. And this quote here, which I feel like has influenced a lot of what you do. Lilly, you learned that marketing should be held to the same standards of rigor that we expect from finance, engineering, or medicine. Can you explain what that means? Yeah, I just think no matter what you do, and I think this is particularly true of marketing, the idea is we should be making a material contribution to the realization of the organization's goals and vision and its performance and its future, right?

19:24We joke, my wife will joke, my friends will joke, right? Like, oh, it's about brand colors or it's about a tagline or it's about a mascot or whatever. And it's like, no, it's not. I want our job and our crew to materially add to the demand for Texas A &M University, for the reputation of it, for its future, for its relevance, for its usefulness, right? I want to make sure we are needed and contributing the way that finance does or that law does or that my faculty do, whatever it may be. We can't just be a joke. We can't just be a throwaway taglines, colors. That stuff gets forgotten. Materially contributing to the creation and the reinforcement and sometimes the changing of audience attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors is what we're in the business of.

20:06We better do that damn well. This quote spoke to me because we talk a lot about the people we like to talk to and be around are those who treat marketing as a craft. And it's like, I always think like so many things when it comes to marketing inside of the company, we, they come under scrutiny or second guess. But it's like engineering is a very serious job. I'm not down there like micromanaging the engineers work or the product teams work or accounting. But for some reason, the discipline of marketing, I think it's because everybody has written something. Everybody has made a little design in Canva.

20:37Everyone has, you know, done public speaking at some point. It's like everyone feels like they can do marketing, but it's this level of like, no, this is a craft. Like we put this on the same standard inside of our company here as we do finance, engineering, et cetera. I really like that perspective. It is an art and a science, right? I don't know. 15 years ago, Dilbert said that marketing is just liquor and guessing. It's a little more than that. I promise. And there's a difference between brand and branding. I think we get caught up in the branding, but the building of a brand, whether it's your own, whether it's your companies, whether your families, your churches, whatever it may be, has an art and science to it.

21:11And I think what I've tried to bring in these environments is bringing the non-marketers up to speed on this idea that we want both. There is a gut to it. There's a judgment. There's a taste. There's a hell of a lot of data. There's a hell of a lot of learning. You're teaching your exit five community that and have for many years. You need the art and the science to be excellent at this craft. All right. Let's get into some of the things you've done here. This is such an applicable lesson. So you've taken this basically blue ocean strategy to your media efforts going where higher ed isn't. And this is so relatable to so many companies that are listening because there's so much competition and noise.

21:46Instead of fighting for other schools with the same billboards, you've done a bunch of crazy things kind of outside of Texas, outside of the four walls of the university. Let's go into some of these plays you told me about at dinner and some of your greatest hits from the last couple of years? Yeah, there's some fun ones. I think I'll start with some of the stuff that's behind me right now. I start with the philosophy first. Start with the philosophy. Like you said, we're not advertising at the Houston airport. Let's talk about some of the go where people are piece of this first. Yeah. I mean, if you go back to Blue Ocean Strategy, right?

22:16One of the things that we try to do is if there's the opportunity, identify audiences that I want to grow my perception, my reputation, my trust with, and how do I access them preferably in a novel way where in a blue ocean, I'm not competing against a hundred other universities. I'm the only one there, but I'm authentic. And what we call it is strategic presence. Like we have every right to be there and add something to the conversation and the experience. So those two words for me is blue ocean. I don't need to win the billboards of the highways. I don't need to win the security bins at the airport.

22:48I want to go to where there's fandoms and communities who are engaged. And I want to offer something to their experience where they go, Ooh, I didn't know that about Texas A &M. I want to know more. Or you're contributing that and how could we work with you, for instance. So that to me is how we break into fandoms and be authentic and value added within them, which to us has gotten us a lot of attention and a lot greater understanding. One of the first big ones was NASCAR and IndyCar. There's 80 million NASCAR fans, 40 million IndyCar fans, which is up 20 % year over year. There's 18 weekends.

23:20They're all on Fox. A &M is the only university there. So NASCAR was the first, and that was through a relationship. I've got a helmet up behind me where we just kind of fell into this idea of sponsoring a driver's helmet that grew and grew, et cetera. I don't need to tell the whole story. But when I got down here, we realized again, for a school that has incredible Texas equity, that wants it throughout the United States, there's 80 million engaged NASCAR fans in the United States alone. 41 % are women, and they're the most brand attached of any of the major sporting events. And more so than IndyCar, they're on like 40 weekends.

23:54That's a real stat. 41 % of NASCAR fans are women. Correct. And they're getting younger and younger and more diverse and across the country. I'd have in a bubble. Incredible opportunity there. So can we take them a story about engineering and national security and defense and support of veterans and military families and teamwork and collaboration and aerodynamics and data? Yeah, the hell yeah, we can, right? Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example.

24:26Last month, we ran an Exit 5 live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases, and McKeel, director of AI innovation at Optimizely, actually won the whole session. He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2000 accounts, their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the Holy grail of ABM, by the way, optimizely agent platform is built specifically for you, the B2B marketer. You can build your own agents like McKeel did or pull from a directory of 50 plus prebuilt ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place.

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25:36Yep, before I was just a thought leader. I was a real marketer. and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168 % year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48 % through paid search and they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team.

26:08Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. So we've gotten in NASCAR with some sponsorships, and now it has become an associate sponsorship with Haas Factory Team. So we sponsor races too that make sense to us. We sponsored two years ago at the Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day with one of our former students' names, a missing in action soldier on the windshield of that car.

26:49That's the most patriotic event in the nation, at least in the racing world, other than maybe the Indianapolis 500, where we were as well that day. And we wanted to tell a story about being the number one veteran serving university in America. What a better place to do it and to do it largely alone. So that was through NASCAR. And then we can talk about IndyCar if you want, which has been incredible. But again, it's not about racing. I want you to tell the story about the lightning in a bottle that you caught from doing the IndyCar thing, the helmet, the finish, because I just think it's a good example of like, I said this to somebody who's silly yesterday.

27:21So it was like in the top of my head, but like you made space for greatness, Ethan, which is like the fact that you did this and took this big swing, like this crazy thing ended up happening. And I want you to tell that story. Yeah. And it was accumulated, right? There's a little bit of the Lionel Messi of like, you know, it took me 1700 days to become an overnight success, right? We've been doing this for three years, but the reality was we realized in IndyCar in particular, 18 weekends a year on Fox that a valuable piece of real estate when they go to the in-car camera is the back of the driver's helmet.

27:50And so we sponsored a driver and we started putting our logo there just to create intrigue. Then we started bringing our commercial in. He's doing social, team's doing social, we're at the races, et cetera. It crescendos. We learned more about that. So this past year, we again, sponsored Felix Rosenquist. We did it in a myriad of ways, two cars we can talk about, but in particular, the helmet. The helmet's incredible real estate, like we talked about. And it just so happens that being on his fire suit, on his helmet, as you can see above me and the back of his helmet, we happen to be with the guy who ends up winning the closest Indianapolis 500 in its 110 year history.

28:24and the last 86 seconds of that race are the most exciting race you've ever seen or the most exciting racing action you've ever seen. And we're on board for all of it. So you said lightning, right? Marketing can't create the lightning, but it can create the lightning rod. And our job is to put us into environments where the extraordinary can happen. And for us, Felix Rosenquist brought the lightning and the extraordinary happened. We got such attention for that participation that weekend in particular and the other 17 races of the year. It was cool. We'll bring it up in post. I want to show the, you showed it to me at dinner, just like two minutes of the head and him eventually, you know, I don't know what it's called, but he passed the guy and he won and it was incredible.

29:01But to your point, it's so hard because like so often in marketing, we're making the decision. We want that like lightning strike, but we're not willing to realize that it took three years of doing it and reps and lessons and just time in market for like something amazing to happen. We want the viral sensation right out of the gate. That's kind of one lesson I took from that. The other one is just, I just love the mechanics of like, you just sponsored the helmet. And I think there's like so many cool things. I talked to you about this, but I'll say them on the podcast so we can have this for later.

29:30But when I was at Drift and we wrote this book, everybody, you see it now, right? You go to NASDAQ, you go to Times Square, you get this big billboard and it's like, congrats on being whatever. Well, in 2018, 2019, not many people were doing that, but we found like it was only these companies that went public. It was this big perception thing. Well, I found out you can advertise on that thing. Okay. You could buy it for the whole day. Well, we don't have the budget for that. I said, well, what's the lowest increment I could get? They said, oh, you could do it in 15 minute increments. I said, really?

30:00Okay. For 15 minute increments, what's the cost? I don't know. It was like 17 grand. Okay, cool. So we bought it for 15 minutes. I went to New York with a video team, with a photo team. We took the pictures. And so we took the pictures. I think if you mashed up all of the engagement and impressions from what we got out of that on LinkedIn. Do you think anybody on social media was like, well, they didn't have it for the whole day? Right. No, no, absolutely. It's about, you know, making hay with what you've got and standing out again with audiences that you care about and an impression that you want to make.

30:32It's not just screwing around. Now I've got people searching, people interested, learning more from Felix, from us, from the team on Fox, et cetera. I mean, the search data of that, the intrigue of that, where we're taking audiences as a result, that opened the door. Now we have to walk through it. Okay. What else have you done that's worth talking about for this crew on the pod? I got, I think, yeah. Yeah. I really liked this one. I think it's an interesting one. So previously, Texas A &M University used to spend a pretty penny to go and do an Aggie house at South by Southwest. And I think what's interesting about that is who comes to an Aggie house at South by Southwest?

31:06Aggies, right? Well, the Aggies know us. That's a bit of the choir? How can we do that differently? And so one of the things that we've done over the now the last three years is we've partnered with Fast Company Magazine. And instead of having our own house, we're a meaningful piece of their Fast Company grill at the Cedar Door Grill there, right across the street from the JW Marriott of those days. And what do we bring? We bring our science. We bring our discovery. We bring our innovation. We bring our researchers. So this past year, we had an exhibition there where the minute you walk in that grill, you're going to get exposed to us, but you're not going to see football.

31:35You're going to see our innovations in space. You're going to see our innovations in health. You're going to see our innovations in farming, right? You're going to see our innovations in national security. Then we're going to give you a panel experience. You're going to see some of those innovators, our astronauts, our innovators in AI or dementia, whatever it may be. It's gone so well that Fast Company came back to us last year and said, we want to add an entire day to it that's A &M focused, which we'll do again this March at South by. That's a whole new crowd coming in and literally routinely saying, I'd never heard a Texas A &M before, or I had no idea you were doing this in dot, dot, dot across my 4 ,400 researchers just here.

32:12And so that sort of presence, I think, again, goes back to, do we want to be known more so by our Aggies or is this incredible blue ocean of people, smart, innovative, driven people coming to South by that we have an incredible story to share with them and either introduce ourselves or reintroduce ourselves positively and emotionally as we think about what they think of us. That's cool. That's a good one. It's like product marketing where it's like, hey, we're known for this one thing. That's actually not the whole story. Let's go tell them about all these other things that we can do. I'm coming.

32:42We talked about, I'm coming to Aggie House this year. Don't tell Anna. Anna's not going to be happy. Well, you're coming to Fast Company. There's no Aggie House, but yeah, you come. Absolutely. And then I think the other one is partnerships, right? You see behind me here, but the work that we've done with Buc-ee's, the work that we've done with Dude Perfect, the work that we're doing with Poncho, exploring those other partnerships. That's what NASCAR has been. Those ideas of bringing to market combinations where we're bringing communities together and telling our collective story has been, I think, pretty innovative.

33:09Well, hold on. Let's just give people the intel there though. I know this because we hung out, but the connection to Bucky's and Dude Perfect, you found people who went to school at Texas A &M and those are the brands that you're working with and profiling. It's like, we would call it co-marketing, I guess, in my world. Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, I want the nation and I really want everyone eight to 16 to know that the five dudes are Aggies and that this all started here and that they're values based and that they're incredible entertainers and incredible dads and incredible former students. I want you to know they got their start and they love Texas A &M University.

33:46I want to make that very apparent. Beaver Applin, founder and CEO of Buc-ee's, right? I want you to know that this incredible operation and now this incredible brand started here, launching in 1982 as an Aggie. These are like case studies, right? It's kind of like how in my world, we'd call it a case study. It's like, oh, these, the dudes went to A &M, like let's go tell their story, right? They would want to do that. They'd sign up for that. Yeah. Are you 17 and want to be a creator, right? You know, That's a wonderful opportunity here to us to tell, again, that magnitude and momentum. We're not just big and stoic and static, right?

34:19We've got this incredible magnitude. I'm spoiled with stories on this campus to tell daily, but I want to make sure they're impactful and relevant and useful. And so those are some of those. And then we draw those partnerships. They're not just licensing deals and not just sponsorships. They're actually full-blown partnerships that we can then storytell against and create impressions about. And that's what I'm in the business of. how do you decide what is worth doing, right? In a world where like you could go to lunch after this and bump into some kid on the way to the mess hall or whatever, the cafeteria, and they have some amazing story.

34:52I'm asking this because this is the endless, the marketers have this, you know, gift sometimes and a curse of endless ideas. There's a thousand things you could go and tell stories around. Do you have a framework or way to go and prioritize like what things your team is actually gonna go and do? Cause it can't be everything. Yeah. I mean, it's based initially on our strategy. And then I would come down one layer and say, then it's our content strategy, right? So within our strategy of this idea of being the best university for the nation, of being impossible to ignore and easy to understand, you have to pass those first, right?

35:23The second piece to us is then what are our content pillars that we're working against? And for this next year in particular, we've got one that's big in the space of fostering trust, which is a huge piece right now in higher education, right? Whether that's affordability, accessibility, the value of the degree, the experience of the degree, continuing to build perceptions with the American public around trust is a huge pocket for our programming. There's two others that we're working on. I'll hit on one right now, but this is a university that's got incredible brawn and muscle and innovation in the health space, but it's not something that's often well known.

35:57We're known for agriculture. We're known for engineering, but I've got 12 colleges here, all of which are working on some aspect of Alzheimer's and dementia. And so I want you to know the magnitude of when you partner with A &M and what you're going to get in that space. And so to the point of the stories, what am I looking for? I'm looking for incredible health stories right now. I'm looking for incredible innovations that are coming to market and making a practical dent in the world's biggest challenges. If I've got one of those, let's talk. If it's about creating trust or perceptions of building leaders of character, let's talk.

36:26If it's about building perceptions of quantum, let's talk. If it's about building perceptions of our plays in national security, let's talk, right? So there's a color. How do you get plugged into that? Is it like a Slack message from someone in the department? How does it actually work? Well, one of the best that you mentioned that I didn't hit on is I think the incredible blessing that we have when we have 4 ,300 faculty on a daily basis working on the world's biggest challenges. And so I have a team focused on not only understanding them and knowing them, but what they're working on and what is the mediable value of that.

36:58So where our earned media hits in the last three years have almost quadrupled. okay hold on hold on so you have like a sub team in marketing that's job is like faculty enablement or something exactly we call a national earned it's earned media and pr cool and are those do those faculty members have the freedom to like be on x and be on instagram and be on linkedin and sharing stuff and that all rolls up into earned media that you get totally dr tatiana has over 2 million followers on instagram with her physics experience damn that's so cool actually if you think about it, you have 4 ,300 like subject matter.

37:34Your job is pretty cool. It's cooler than more I talk to you. It's 4 ,300 subject matter experts that all could be micro famous in their own little niche, which is so cool. Completely. So the New York Times calls about something involving public health. We're going to offer you Jay Matic and the work that he's doing, you know, in public spaces and getting outside and getting off that technology. You want to understand tariffs or the economics of egg prices or beef prices right now. I'm going I give you David Anderson out of the ag school who literally two years ago had 35 earned media hits and last year had 3 ,500.

38:07He didn't become an expert overnight. We just gave him the mouthpiece. We gave him the megaphone. We gave him the attention and he's an expert and he shines now. They're calling him now as a subject matter authority. Yeah. How do you track that by the way? 3 ,500 versus 35. He has a platform called Cision that allows us basically like I know. Yeah. I started my career in PR and Cision was how you'd find journalists. So Cision's still around. I come in every day and see between 150 to 2 ,200 media hits overnight from our experts and our university and what we're putting out into the world that shapes their perceptions of this place and our people.

38:40How much do you control that message? That professor or whatever is a scientist, some expert, are you reading it and you're like, I wish they didn't say it that way and we got to media train them? Or is there a really long leash here in letting them be experts? There's a little bit of both. I mean, they are experts and we do perform media training and we do call, you know, a pool of our experts that we know are going to perform or be demanded and create trust with these reporters, et cetera, because you want that consistency and that repeat. So we know some, right? Many are talking to the press in their own ways and that's fine.

39:12That's their prerogative here. I think the big thing that we've tried to do is create platforms for them. So when we do South by, we're bringing them there on topics. When we go to Fast Company's Innovation Festival, we're bringing them and putting them in there. We're putting them in our commercials, et cetera. So we're able to understand who knows what, how do they do with the media? And when we get a phone call, it's a really easy equation of you need to talk to X, Y, Z, and we are able to help oftentimes pass that baton and they shine. And again, I get to do that with a lot of people across all subjects.

39:43What are the challenges in your world? Everything I've talked to you about is going awesome. Things are great. Relate to the listeners. We all got marketing. Everyone's grass is always greener. What are some of the marketing challenges that you got right now? I'm sure it's the same for many folks. You know, one I think is talent. We want to continue to get the best marketers in all of those domains that we need, largely to College Station, although I have quite a few remote workers, paying them on a public university salary and get them to contribute at the level that they would at Yeti or Sony or Coca-Cola or American Eagle, right?

40:18So the first is I got to build an incredible team of marketing practitioners, many of which which thankfully the opportunity we have is we can get them out of the business school here, right? But I got to build a hell of a marketing team that can do justice to this place. Like I said, we have 17 colleges, right? You can get spoiled, but you can get extremely distracted as to what would you focus on versus bringing in things, two or three priorities that we're going to nail for a year so that the American public's perception of that will change. You know, we're not marketing toothpaste, right? We're marketing a giant university and all it has to offer.

40:52I think that's number one. Number two is just the higher ed landscape right now. I think for us, it's a giant opportunity. I love where we're positioned in the spectrum or the pendulum of what the American public wants, but the decline in trust, the decline in perceptions of value, decades of what most would argue is just escalating prices, affordability, accessibility, the relevance of the education, the usefulness of the education, the political environment. All of those are shaping the public's perception right now on should a child or a student go to college? Where should they go? For how long?

41:27What should they study? And they're wary of a lot of that. We have to be a beacon. We have to be a spear, the tip of the spear to say that higher ed is a place where the American dream can still be accessible and alive and well, especially at Texas A &M. Come here and all those things you want, I think you're going to do really, really well. I keep changing my tune as my, you know, our kids are similar age and I am like, four years ago, I was like, oh, they don't need to go to college. And look, please don't get offended. Someone listened to this like, who didn't go to college. I'm not saying any of that.

41:59I'm just saying, I do think the value that I see now in my kids going to college is like the social aspect, learning how to live, learning how to live on your own, waking up and having to go to the cafeteria and get food or it's closed, you know, just living life. I think there's a huge benefit to doing that. Well, our president did a wonderful job yesterday in what was a state of the university address announcing what we're calling the Aggie Passport, which is basically documenting all of the education a student gets outside of the classroom. So whether it's the service projects, whether it's study abroad, whether it's the 1300 student organizations we have here, whether it's their civic involvement, whatever it may be, they're getting a huge education here at Texas A &M inside the classroom, but also outside the classroom that will benefit them for life.

42:40And we want to be able to show an employer now what that actually looks like when they graduate. And we want to expect that they will gain that while they're here and not just sit in their dorm room, which they don't do. So I think this is an incredible place of a well-rounded common sense education that is producing not only leaders of character, but people that are going out into the workplace and making meaningful contributions. Two questions that we're going to wrap up. Number one, you're very intentional with your words and naming and branding. And I think that's a common trait among people who are really good at this.

43:10Is this an A &M thing or is this a U thing where we don't call them alumni, we call them former students? In that respect, the tradition and ritual and spirit largely here at Texas A &M is unique and it's special. The former students aspect, the importance we place on the word here, whether it's the 12th man or gig him or son him off or the war him, we have a language here. But it's, again, a common language that binds and bonds our people across generations, across classes. And again, I think the experience of being an Aggie can be as rich from 22 to 85 as it is from 18 to 22. And that's a piece of it.

43:48The ring is a piece of that. This incredible avid community is a piece of that. But I think beyond that, words matter. And I love hardworking words in marketing. I want them to carry great weight. I do. Dan and I have been talking about this a lot lately. We forgot this lesson a little bit, and we've been naming things more intentionally. The meeting that we do on Friday has a name. The way we're doing this offsite has a name. The way we set our goals has a name. There's something with humans, and we like to name things. We pick them up. It's a little repetition. It's like when you name something, it makes it more real for a reason, I guess.

44:20Yeah, I want the words to carry weight. I want the one word to say a thousand, right? And so I think our intentionality about that's really important. The last thing, actually, this is not a question, but something I want to touch on. I think the thing that makes your story really interesting to me in this audience is just like, you're very curious. You've learned so much. You're not just studying other higher ed institutions. You're learning from Nike and HubSpot and these tech brands and consumer brands. I just think that's such an important mindset because we talked to so many people. It's like, well, I need a specific B2B marketing landing page example, or I can't make this connection.

44:56And it's like, I don't know, the more people I talk to, like Ethan, it's like, no, you see everything. And then you kind of pattern match. Do you have any final words or thoughts on just like getting ideas and inspiration from outside of your industry? Because certainly you've not just done things that have been done before in higher ed. This blue ocean strategy is working. Yeah, I go back to one leader at Lilly with a quick story about his name is Mike Mason. Mike is the one that told me with jobs, you always want to take jobs where there's enough clay to mold something beautiful, right? which is the delta between what is and what could be if you go and do a great job.

45:29And so I think of him in that regard. But to your question, when I started at Lilly in marketing, I was working on Cymbalta, but I was working on the pain side of it. So you've got this drug that can work equally well in depression and fibromyalgia and anxiety as it can in knee pain and back pain, et cetera. And I say that to say, I got really geeked out in the pain states. I learned all around the descending pain pathway and how pain drugs worked and opioids and non-opioids, et cetera. But Mike came to me one day, and as we thought about next roles in a big company that's just not a pain company, but rather a medicine company of all of its facets.

46:02And he said, what I'm trying to figure out with you, Ethan, is are you a pain expert or are you a great marketer? Because if you're a pain expert, I can never move you to something else. If you're a great marketer, I can put you anywhere. And that's what I believe has helped me in my career is I can go to higher ed. I can go to nonprofit. I can go to Lilly. I can go to Yeti. and I'm going to figure it out because those marketing fundamentals, as Acker says, right? You can learn them in a day, but it'll take you a lifetime to master. I want to take that marketing craft. I believe I can take it anywhere and get to work.

46:32Dude, this is crazy. That's such a good, literally I wrote about this today. There's no chance you read this. I wrote about this on LinkedIn today. I just was like, spoiler alert, there is no playbook, right? The playbook is I love the job of marketing and like, yep, I'm now the CMO at Texas A &M. I'm going to use the ingredients here to figure it out. Oh, I'm now the CEO of Hula, the co-working space that I go to. No, I'm going to figure it out. And I'm a rap guy. So I liken everything to a rap lyric. Jay-Z said, put me anywhere on God's green earth. I could triple my worth. And I feel like it's like, once you know the marketing strategy, I love that.

47:03Are you a pain guy? Like, are you the subject matter expert on pain or are you the marketer? Love that. So good. Yeah. So good. All right. Ethan Braden, I'm getting the evil stare from this conference room that I'm in right now. I got to get out. I hope you have a great day at work. Always good to hang with you. If anything makes me want to do it more, I hopefully will do something at South by Southwest and I'll see you soon. Appreciate all of your, you know, just good vibes and contribution to our community. I want more people to follow you. We got to get you past 10, the next milestone, me and the team are going to be on this.

47:30You're at about 8 ,000 LinkedIn followers. 10K is a meaningful milestone. We're going to get you there, buddy. We're going to do it. Okay. Okay. Well, I'll try to do my part in that, but thank you for having me. I know it's untraditional or non-traditional, but this is a real honor. I've followed you a long time and appreciate you. No, it's not. I mean, I put notes in Slack while I have people on the pod because like I do show notes and stuff later. And this is actually a really important lesson. I think I've been talking to more people. I get caught up in this lane of like, I need to talk, Dave, you need to interview B2B marketers because I'm a B2B marketer.

47:58And it's like, no, once you realize the whole world is connected, you can learn more from people who are not necessarily in your industry. And like, I don't know, that's why meeting you and hanging out at our event has fired me up and getting to see you again. It fired me up all over again. So good job. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I'll see you later. We'll see you.

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