Myla Edmond got tired of hearing that students don't read. So she put 35 people in a room and counted every general message the university sent an incoming first-year student in one year. The number was 273.

Myla is senior vice president at EducationDynamics, where she helped build the fractional CMCO offering and now serves as the interim marketing leader institutions bring in when they're between hires, or unsure they want one. She's also a published poet. Her career thesis is one word, congruence: the gap between who an institution says it is and who it is, and whose job it is to close it.

In this Icons episode, Myla explains why marketers are the mirrors, why she'd rather change the institution than the copy, and why she stopped attaching herself to the outcome. It's a conversation about what awareness is worth when nobody has to act on it, and what a marketing leader owes an institution that has been raised to wait for someone else to decide.

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In 2009, Ravi Jain pitched a 60-second video series to Boston College and got told you can't tell a story in 60 seconds. He said let's try.

A Boston College Minute ran 8 episodes a year for over a decade and taught a generation of higher ed marketers what campus video could be. It was years ahead of Reels and TikTok, and it wasn't his first one. In 2002 he made an interactive web sitcom that got recognized at SXSW before YouTube existed. Then a talk show shot from his car during his commute, which earned a Webby nod in 2007. He's taught at Northeastern since 2004, sits on CASE faculty, teaches AR/VR at MassArt, and picked up an MBA from BC 16 years into the job.

Ravi walks Mallory and Volt through where the 60 seconds came from, how a pilot got approved on an iPod Touch with a pair of headphones, and what it cost to be the guy funding the future of campus video on a shoestring budget. He gets into the year he learned what an Instagram Story was, from a colleague, in 2017. And he lands on AI with the least breathless take you'll hear this year.

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Everyone in higher ed agrees a website should treat people well. So why do many websites fall so short?

Joel Goodman has spent close to 20 years closing that gap. He ran Bravery Media for 13 years, named a framework — Hospitable Design — and evangelized his approach across the field through talks, podcasts, and client work. 

The idea is simpler than it sounds and harder than anyone admits: a website isn't for the dean who wants his photo up top. It's for the 17-year-old trying to find out if you have her major and whether she can afford it. Joel grew up around the hospitality industry  and built a career arguing higher ed should treat that person like a guest and create a space for them that’s welcoming, attentive, and anchored in care

He walks Mallory and Volt through where the instinct came from, why an idea everyone nods along to still doesn't get built, and what AI search does to a philosophy that rests on the person showing up. He's still the critic he's always been, still hoping for better despite the optimist that he isn’t, and still finding the next problem to name … and solve.

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In 2010, Jennifer Lonchar pitched retargeting to higher ed with “janky PowerPoint decks” and a Zappos analogy, and schools called it Big Brother. The schools that said yes rode the digital wave for a decade. The schools that said no spent years catching up. Fifteen years later, she's having the same conversation again — same skepticism, same "does it even work," same budget hesitation — this time about streaming TV, with her own name on the company.

Jen walks Mallory and Volt through what category education costs when you're early: the 3 years before real adoption, the cartwheels down the hallway over the first $100K contract, and the University of Cincinnati campaign that had a recruiter in Vietnam calling to ask why students kept showing up saying they saw the school everywhere. Then she gets into the second bet — the business partner who spent a year and a half convincing her, the 2 years of self-doubt before she printed AmbioEdu business cards for NACAC, and what it means that founding something felt like jumping off a cliff with your eyes closed even after being right the first time.

The argument underneath: branding is lead generation. Students don't fill out forms for schools they've never heard of, and if you're waiting until they know your name to show up, someone else got there first. The living room, as Jen puts it, is the new quad.

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Lee Coffin made Tufts cool. Then he walked into Dartmouth and did it again.

Over 30 years, Coffin turned two very good universities into two of the most wanted schools in the country. He gave the field its language — "the qualified muddle," the creative essay, the case for putting voice next to data on every application. In 2024 he made Dartmouth the first Ivy to bring back the SAT, and the rest of the Ivy League followed inside a year. He's spent the last 32 years and 100-plus podcast episodes pulling the curtain back on the whole process. If higher ed admissions has icons, Lee Coffin is one of them.

We got him for the kind of conversation you only hear from someone in the top of the ninth, his words. He explains why volume is not the coin of the realm, even at a 6 percent admit rate. How he turned a test score into a story by reading it against the room it came from. Why he leaned Dartmouth all the way into rural when a consultant told him to sell urban. And what it costs to be the warmest gatekeeper in the Ivy League and still say no to 94 of every 100 students who knock.

We also get into where it started: a public-school guidance counselor who looked at a straight-A kid and said "I don't have time for the smart ones," and the first-gen instinct that became a 30-year practice of translating this process for the families nobody helps.

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Every institution claims students belong there. Dayana Kibilds says that claim falls apart the second you hold it up against the experience students find when they arrive.

She has worked every seat this industry offers. She led domestic recruitment at Western University, ran brand and messaging engagements at Ologie across dozens of institutions, and now serves as AVP of marketing and community at Simpson Scarborough. She co-wrote Mailed It, the book higher ed marketers reach for when their email program stops performing.

OnDeck Marketing CEO John Reid takes the host chair for this one. 

Day’s argument: the field avoids talking about the parts that are hard, and students pay for that. Academically rigorous institutions leave the rigor out of the marketing, so students show up unprepared for the reality. Every institution names community as its differentiator, which drains the word of meaning. Getting closer to right means showing instead of telling, then letting the audience decide whether the challenge described is the one they want.

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Thank you to our founding sponsor. OnDeck Marketing keeps colleges and universities visible where high school decisions actually start—inside the school day. Their North American in-school network puts branded screens in high schools and runs digital channels that maintain consistent presence in feeder markets, so institutions don't go dark on students before they ever start searching. Learn more at ondeckmktg.com.

Teresa Valerio Parrot is the person higher ed presidents call first. Principal of TVP Communications, CASE Laureate, Crystal Apple winner, PR News industry innovator, and to the leaders she counsels, the "president whisperer" — the one who can get a guarded administrator to say the true thing out loud.

In this conversation, Teresa walks Mallory and Volt through what that discipline looks like when it holds and when it slips. The president who wanted to make a public statement about undocumented students, and why 5 private conversations protected those students better than a headline ever would. The call she got wrong: a team that swore no one had talked, a leak she didn't see coming, 2 weeks of her life spent putting the pieces back, and the shadow plan she now builds every time in case the worst arrives early. 

It's a conversation about putting the institution ahead of your own reflection in the glass, about honesty that arrives wrapped in optimism, and about a career built by getting out of her own way.

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Jack Martin came to higher education from politics. Before he ran marketing at the University of Washington, before he built one of the most admired storytelling programs in the field, he worked for Governor Kathleen Sebelius. He ran comms for a congressman. He spent the first decade of his career learning how to move audiences who didn't already agree with him.

Then he walked into higher ed and noticed something.

Nobody was polling. Nobody was testing the words. Nobody was asking what the public actually thought of the institution — they were just telling the institution's story louder and hoping it would land. Universities, Jack realized, are political actors operating in a politicized country, and most of them are flying blind.

In this episode of Higher Ed Icons, Jack walks Mallory and Volt through what it looks like to bring a campaign operative's discipline into a major public research university and what the field still doesn't understand about its own audiences.

He talks about the immersive storytelling program at UW that set the standard the rest of the field is still chasing. He talks about the Big Ten We Are Here campaign — a $1,500 ad that landed 250 million impressions during football season — and why every conference should be doing the same thing. He talks about the moment President Robert Jones tested the phrase debt-free and watched public perception of a UW degree jump twenty points overnight.

And he says the thing nobody else in higher ed will say on tape: the academy is naive about politics, and naivete is costing the field.

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Terry Flannery has been the first person to hold her job three different times. First marketing director at the University of Maryland. First VP of Communication at American University. First-ever EVP and COO at CASE. When the institution offered her the founding marketing role at Maryland with a $48,000 budget, no staff, and a job description that read "coordinate the deans' messages," she turned it down. Then waited for the institution to come back and ask what it would actually take.

In this episode of Higher Ed Icons, Terry sits down with Mallory and Volt to walk through the career that shaped how higher ed thinks about marketing. The original argument she made to skeptical faculty using a definition borrowed from a Northwestern academic. The four-step process behind WONK that most institutions skip. The dial-up, dial-down brand architecture that let WONK speak to faculty, alumni, and donors in three different registers without losing the through-line.

She also names something most senior marketers won't say out loud — that politics is the job, not a distraction from it. That the fights in higher ed are vicious because the stakes are so low. And that the people who do this work well are the ones who stop pretending the political work is separate from the strategic work.

It's a conversation about building the function before the function exists, the discipline that makes bold creative possible, and what thirty-five years of being the first person in the room taught her about saying no until the institution is ready to say yes.

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Marketers have been sold the wrong order of operations.

Permission, then proof, then scale. That's the sequence most of us were trained on. Devin Purgason argues it's exactly why so many marketers are stuck — and the people actually moving on AI, on student experience, on work that matters, are running it the other way. Proof first. Permission after. Scale once the evidence is in the room.

From there, the conversation opens up into how that mindset plays out across an entire career. How to choose what to prioritize when the budget is fractional. Why community college marketers should be sitting in graduate enrollment sessions. What agentic AI is actually doing to the role, and why brand awareness gets more important in an agent-mediated world, not less.

We also get into the case for collapsing marketing and student care into one function and what happens when the team responsible for the promise is also responsible for whether the promise gets kept.

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