Higher Ed Icons

Higher Ed Icons
  • 5.0 (11)
  • Education

Celebrating the pioneers, thought leaders, trend setters, and change makers in higher education marketing. With your hosts: Voltaire Santos Miran and Mallory Willsea.

  1. 3d ago

    Episode 16 - Defending Silos and Moving Beyond Boxology

    Rob Zinkan asks rooms full of higher ed marketers to raise their hand if they’re happy with their org chart. Nobody ever does. Rob has spent his career on the part of marketing most people never see: the organization that has to deliver the work. At Indiana University East, a campus where only 5% of local high school students chose to enroll, he put marketing, fundraising, alumni relations, and campus life under 1 roof. Enrollment grew 85% in 5 years. He went on to lead brand strategy for the IU system and a network of more than 200 marketers spread across it, then spent years studying how colleges plan. He has read more than 240 strategic plans and nearly 100 marketing org charts. Today he runs Navigate Gray, a firm that designs higher ed marketing organizations, and co-edits Inside Higher Ed’s Call to Action column. If higher ed marketing has an architect, it’s Rob. Rob walks Mallory and Voltaire through the “baby gift to legacy gift” model he built at IU East and what happened to it after he left. He makes a case you won’t hear at many conferences: higher ed needs its silos, and the real work happens in the gray space between them. He explains why the org chart is the first place leaders look when something breaks, and why the answer usually lives somewhere else. And he talks about how his thinking on the CMO role changed in 5 years, landing on the line of the episode: we’ve expanded our view of the function faster than our view of the leader. We also get into his idea of a culture of coherence, marketing’s version of advancement’s culture of philanthropy, and why he thinks lifetime engagement belongs to the CMO. 🔑 What You’ll Take Away Why there’s no perfect org chart, and what to look at before you redraw a single box Why a program built around 1 person often leaves when that person does What a “culture of coherence” asks of everyone on campus outside marketing Why marketing keeps getting handed problems it had no seat at the table to shape 1 thing any marketing leader can do this week: name the top priority and what it pushes off the list

  2. Oct 20

    Episode 15 - When Usher Calls

    Almost nobody in this field has done what Claire Machamer has done, at the scale she's done it, this many times. Eleven website redesigns since 2004. A rebuild at UNCSA that won a CASE award, took a Webby nomination, and drove a 518% increase in prospective students raising their hands. A $65 million campaign that closed at $75 million with enrollment up 2.5%. She did it in publishing, in an academic health system, at two arts institutions, and she did it from a BFA in graphic design and an MS in IT management, including two years running UNCSA's entire technology division as its CTO. Now she's the first SVP of communications and marketing at Berklee, where one brand system and one website have to hold 6 entities, 3 campuses, 42% international enrollment, and 90,000 alumni who each have a version of the logo they love. It's the most complicated project of her career and it launches this fall. Mallory and Volt get into what she's learned about running things this big, why she goes looking for broken institutions on purpose, and the one part of this work that 22 years of better tooling has failed to make any easier. 🔑 What You'll Take Away Why the biggest drag in a marketing shop is usually the cost nobody owns What 11 website redesigns teach you about which parts of the work get faster and which hold still Where AI stops being useful on a redesign, and why the bottleneck is institutional memory How to rebuild way finding around what someone wants to learn rather than which campus they should pick What changes when the brand system has to hold 6 identities without flattening any of them Why a mentor's rule about taking the job that scares you produced a career nobody would draw on purpose

  3. Oct 6

    Episode 14 - Moving (Back) From a Branded House to a House of Brands

    Seth Odell has a habit of saying yes before he knows how. He told UCLA he knew Final Cut Pro, learned it over a weekend, and became their videographer. He tweeted "would anyone watch a live show about higher ed?" and had a sponsor by dinner. He pitched TV spots at Southern New Hampshire University with zero experience making them, and the spots helped build the most visible marketing operation in the industry. He left an executive job in the middle of a pandemic to start Kanahoma with $5,000 and 1 client. It's now on the Inc. 5000 for the second year in a row.  Every chapter starts the same way: somebody asks if he can do the thing, and he figures it out on the way. That's the conversation Seth has with Volt and Mallory, who've each watched it up close for 15 years. Where the instinct comes from.  Then he does the thing he's known for. He looks at where search is going and says the part nobody wants to hear: the playbook higher ed built its budgets on is the yellow pages, and the brand structure it spent 20 years building may not survive what comes next. 🔑 What You'll Take Away How Seth decides when a chapter is over, in 2 sentences Why saying yes to the weird job is a career strategy What being early feels like from the inside, and how to tell it from being wrong Why he thinks paid search and the branded house are both on the clock What it costs to build things this way, from someone who's still paying

  4. Sep 22

    Episode 13 - Your Mission Won’t Save You, And No One Is Coming ...

    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. 🔑 What You'll Take Away Why "students don't read" is a sentence that leaves you with nothing, and what she found when she stopped accepting it The 273-message audit: how she ran it, what it exposed, and why it didn't survive her departure What to change when the institution and the message don't match, and why she picks the institution every time Her honest answer on fractional CMCOs: transition coverage done right, or a trial no other VP has to pass The question she asks before every piece of work, and the 65-page magazine it killed Her read on the industry and the 3 things institutions keep waiting for someone else to do

  5. Sep 8

    Episode 12 - Brave, Brilliant ... and Broke

    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. 🔑 What You'll Take Away Why constraints made his best work, and what disappears when production stops being scarce How a 60-second format got approved with no data or committee The case for building your next thing as a rebuttal instead of a bet on a platform His position on AI in creative work, including the one thing he says you always have to disclose What 25 years of "this changes everything" actually taught him

  6. Aug 25

    Episode 11 - Getting Loud About Hospitable Experience Design

    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. 🔑 What You'll Take Away Why "treat people well" is easy to agree with and hard to build What the restaurant floor teaches about higher ed web design Why the homepage's real job is to get people off of it as quickly as possible The three questions every prospective student asks first Why the obvious idea stalls inside most institutions What  AI search does for the concept of hospitality, and why the fewer visitors who still reach your site matter more than ever

  7. Aug 11

    Episode 10 - The Perception Cliff, the Trajectory of Streaming, and the New Creepy Cool

    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.   🔑 What You'll Take Away   Why the schools that called retargeting "creepy" in 2010 are the same ones struggling now and what that predicts about streaming How Jen sold digital before anyone was buying, and why being early means paying an education tax What streaming TV targeting can do at the household level Why the branding-versus-lead-generation debate is a false choice What the perception cliff is, why a Got Milk moment for higher ed hasn't happened, and who would have to fund one The doubt underneath a track record: what it took to bet on a second wave with her own name on the door

  8. Jul 28

    Episode 9 - The J. Crew Dean, the Need for Hip, and the Importance of Vibe

    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. 🔑 What You'll Take Away Why a bigger pile of applications isn't a win and what selective colleges chase instead How a test score means more once you know the school behind it Why so many applicants look identical on paper and the idea ("the qualified muddle") that changed how schools tell them apart What it costs to love saying yes in a job that means rejecting almost everyone Why a student's grades and their story work as a team

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About

Celebrating the pioneers, thought leaders, trend setters, and change makers in higher education marketing. With your hosts: Voltaire Santos Miran and Mallory Willsea.

Information

  • Creator
    Higher Ed Icons
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    17
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Higher Ed Icons

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