Escape Velocity with Tracey Halvorsen

Making time for outside interests can change how you approach your work. In this short excerpt from the first Escape Velocity episode, Dave Look and I talk about choosing where to spend our time, taking things apart to understand them, and what a jazz ensemble can teach us about sharing the lead.

From the Archives brings you short highlights from past Escape Velocity conversations. This continuous 6-minute, 24-second excerpt comes from episode 1, originally released October 21, 2024.

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How do you help someone stretch without pushing them past what they can handle? In this six-and-a-half-minute excerpt, Adrienne Cooper and I talk about flow, the stages of learning, and what managers can do in the small moments of a working day to support both the person and the team.

From the Archives brings you short highlights from past Escape Velocity conversations. This excerpt is from episode 28, originally released March 25, 2026.

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Higher ed keeps asking how to communicate its value. Carol Keese asks whether the product, the price, and the proof need to change too. In this six-minute excerpt, we talk about trust, hidden costs, and why outcomes should shape the message.

From the Archives brings you short highlights from past Escape Velocity conversations. This excerpt is from episode 32, originally released July 23, 2026.

Listen and read the highlight transcript

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify

Full conversation and transcript

Dayana Kibilds was fluent in English and still missed a requirement when she applied to college in the U.S. In this nine-minute exchange, we talk about the assumptions buried in admissions language, who has the help to decode it, and a simple way to see the wall your financial aid pages might be putting up.

From the Archives brings you short highlights from past Escape Velocity conversations. This excerpt is from episode 27, originally released March 16, 2026.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify

Full episode and transcript

Read the highlight transcript

Why do higher ed websites still struggle with the same problems they faced in the 2000s? And why do so many of them look alike?

Tracey Halvorsen talks with Voltaire “Volt” Santos Miran, EVP of Brand and Web Strategy at Carnegie and co-founder of mStoner, about copycat design, shared governance, underfunded web teams, the tension between innovation and proof, and what colleges misunderstand about storytelling.

They also get into AI, accessibility, agency-client relationships, and why institutions should stop casting themselves as the hero. The strongest higher ed stories center the people whose lives are changed.

Explore the episode, transcript, links and Ask the archive at https://escapevelocitypodcast.com/

Carol Keese has spent her career marketing trust in places where trust is the whole game: Johns Hopkins Medicine, Children's National, the University of Virginia, and now the University of Oregon. So when a CMO stands up and says marketing isn't the fix, it's worth listening.

That's the argument at the center of this conversation. Carol wrote a piece in Inside Higher Ed called "Higher Education Was Built on Scarcity. That Model Is Breaking," and it cuts against her own profession. Her point: higher ed has spent two decades answering a value problem with better messaging, and the market stopped believing the message a long time ago. The work sits upstream, in the cost, the design, and the outcomes of the product. Not in the words on the homepage.

Tracey and Carol get into where that leaves marketers, why medicine can't prestige-signal the way higher ed does, and what breaks when a thousand-year-old model built for the elite tries to serve everyone. Then the shift that's already here: a 17-year-old asks an AI about your school long before they ever reach your homepage, and whatever the AI says back is the new first impression. Carol calls it the first campus visit. The website is the second. Her team is rebuilding Oregon's site around that, writing for the machine that reads it first, which means short answers and FAQs instead of the long narrative pages the sector spent a decade building.

She also argues that higher ed should stop walling itself off and act more like a consumer brand. Her proof point: Oregon's Grateful Ducks collaboration with Nike and the Grateful Dead, built on the band's real history in Eugene and Nike's roots at the university. It sold out fast and earned national coverage from Rolling Stone, GQ, Complex, USA Today, and Sports Business Journal. Authentic cultural relevance, not prestige signaling.

It's a candid, specific, occasionally funny conversation about a sector under real pressure, from someone who loves it enough to tell it the truth.

In this episode:

• Why "fix it with marketing" became higher ed's default, and why it stopped working
• The scarcity model: built for permanence, built for the elite, never built for scale
• What medicine gets right that higher ed doesn't, and why outcomes are the difference
• UVA vs. Oregon: professionalizing a legacy brand vs. defining a value proposition from scratch
• AI as the first campus visit, and how that reshapes web content, FAQs, and earned media
• Why rankings are a lagging indicator and what to measure instead (real-time sentiment)
• The CMO seat: getting it is not the point, what you do with it is
• Getting lighter: delight as a marketing strategy for institutions that take themselves too seriously
• Acting like a consumer brand: the Grateful Ducks collab, and why authentic cultural relevance beats prestige signaling

About the guest

Carol Keese is VP of University Communications and CMO at the University of Oregon. Before Oregon, she led brand and marketing at the University of Virginia through a bicentennial, a new president, and a capital campaign. Earlier in her career she held marketing leadership roles at Johns Hopkins Medicine and Children's National. She has presented on higher ed marketing at the AMA, the AAU, and SXSWEdu.

Links

• Carol Keese on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolpkeese
• Carol's Inside Higher Ed article, "Higher Education Was Built on Scarcity. That Model Is Breaking": https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/call-action/2026/05/04/higher-ed-was-built-scarcity-model-breaking
• Blanding: https://blandingaudit.netlify.app

Jaime Hunt has spent more than two decades inside higher education marketing, including nine years as a chief marketing officer at three very different institutions. Now she is the founder of Solve Higher Ed Marketing, author of Heart Over Hype: Transforming Higher Ed Marketing with Empathy, instructor at West Virginia University, and host of Confessions of a Higher Ed CMO.  

In this episode of Escape Velocity, Tracey Halvorsen, CEO of adeo, talks with Jaime about what higher ed marketing looks like from the inside, why empathy is not the opposite of accountability, and how colleges and universities can stop reaching for tactics and start solving the real problems.

They get into Jaime’s shift from journalism to higher ed, what changed when she launched her own firm, and why entrepreneurship made her feel “ungovernable” in the best possible way. They also talk about the evolution of brand and marketing inside higher ed, why internal audiences matter as much as external polish, how agencies can better collaborate with campus teams, and why marketing work has to connect to measurable institutional goals.

The conversation also moves into the pressure higher ed is under right now: the enrollment cliff, shrinking budgets, AI panic, risk aversion, institutional sameness, and the danger of mistaking shiny objects for innovation. Jaime makes the case for curiosity, empathy, and problem-solving as essential leadership disciplines, especially in a moment when campuses need sharper strategy, stronger alignment, and more human-centered marketing.

This is a conversation for higher ed marketers, enrollment leaders, agency partners, presidents, CMOs, and anyone trying to build work that is more useful, more honest, and less driven by hype.

Guest links:
Solve Higher Ed Marketing
Heart Over Hype: Transforming Higher Ed Marketing with Empathy
Confessions of a Higher Ed CMO
Jaime Hunt on LinkedIn

Escape Velocity is hosted by Tracey Halvorsen, CEO of adeo, a brand, digital, and communications agency based in Baltimore working with higher education, cultural institutions, nonprofits, and complex growth brands. Learn more at helloadeo.com.

Topics: higher ed marketing, enrollment marketing, higher education branding, empathy-driven marketing, higher ed CMO, brand strategy, AI in higher education, higher ed enrollment cliff, campus communications, student journey mapping, marketing leadership, internal change management, Solve Higher Ed Marketing, Heart Over Hype, Jaime Hunt.

Alia Poonawala is the founding executive director of Hire Hopkins at Johns Hopkins University and a Sundance-premiering actor. For years she kept the institutional executive and the artist in separate rooms. Then she raised $50K, hired a production team in Italy, and shot her own short film in two months, running it like the partnership deals she's closed for years at companies like Facebook and Uber.

In this Escape Velocity episode, Tracey Halvorsen, CEO of adeo, and Alia get into design thinking as her operating framework, working backwards from the headline, the 80/20 split between business and creative work, and what changes when an autoimmune diagnosis forces a leader to stop overworking. For leaders who are also makers.

What does 20 years of leading digital at one of the world's most recognized nonprofits teach you about curiosity, change, and AI?

In this episode of Escape Velocity, Tracey Halvorsen, CEO of adeo, sits down with Diane Querey, Vice President of Digital Platforms at World Wildlife Fund. The two first met in 2007 through Foursquare, back when checking in on an app counted as a social act. Nearly two decades later, they unpack what it takes to lead digital transformation at a mission-driven organization through three major shifts: the early web, the move to responsive design, and now AI.

Diane led the WWF Together app that won a 2013 Apple Design Award, the Apps for Earth partnership with Apple that raised $8 million for conservation, and WWF's collaboration with Netflix on Our Planet. She also shares the inside story of WWF's recent website relaunch, a multi-year, 6,000-page migration that forced her team to rethink process, vendors, and the role of AI in their day-to-day work. She explains how her team is actually using AI (metadata, alt tags, thought partnership) and where they draw the hard line (original content writing stays human). She unpacks her framework for what separates order takers from strategic partners, and why curiosity is now the defining trait she looks for when hiring.

Tracey and Diane also get into:

The "compression to the middle" problem when teams over-rely on AI

Why AI slop is flooding every platform and how to cut through it

Raising kids who can tell the difference between real and generated content

Reinvention, transition, and the pressure on women to constantly become someone new

Curiosity, creativity, and caution as the three disciplines for working in this moment

This is a conversation for digital leaders, nonprofit strategists, creative directors, and anyone trying to figure out how to lead a team through real change without losing the human at the center of the work.

Escape Velocity is hosted by Tracey Halvorsen, CEO of adeo, a brand, digital, and communications agency based in Baltimore working with higher education, cultural institutions, nonprofits, and complex growth brands. Learn more at helloadeo.com.

Topics: digital transformation, nonprofit technology, World Wildlife Fund, WWF, Apple Design Award, Apps for Earth, Our Planet Netflix, AI in the workplace, website redesign, creative leadership, curiosity and career, strategic thinking, order takers vs strategic partners, AI slop, digital teams, mission-driven work.

In this episode of Escape Velocity, Tracey sits down with Adrienne Cooper to explore what it really takes to build organizations where people can do their best work. Adrienne shares her unconventional path from TV news producer to Allstate leader to founder of her own consultancy, and explains how that journey shaped her approach to culture, leadership, and organizational design.

They get into mission, vision, and values as practical operating tools, not corporate wallpaper. Adrienne also breaks down how she uses LEGO Serious Play to surface hidden perspectives, create alignment, and make sure every voice in the room is heard. The conversation also tackles flow state, delegation, motivation, neurodivergence, leadership readiness, and why diverse lived experience leads to better problem-solving.

They close on the shifting relationship between work and AI, and what human judgment, creativity, and clarity of purpose will matter even more as automation rises. This is a sharp conversation about building companies, teams, and careers with more intention.