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| Hey Marketing Bestie, Us marketers sure can learn a lot from our Marketing fore-fathers and fore-mothers. Consider this a parade for the greatest marketing campaigns in memory. Welcome to Marketing Classics 411, a new kind of ancient history. In place of hieroglyphs, expect to decipher the campaigns of yesterday (and today, when we head back to Texas once more). Professor Millennial teaches every Tuesday (remotely), via electronic mail. Class is now in session. Was this email forwarded to you? A CHANNEL THAT COMPOUNDS Ever notice how much we talk about cool brand collabs & sponsorships? (Guilty. Also, spoiler alert.) BUT. I don't see much that REALLY breaks down what makes a sponsorship pop. The negotiating behind the scenes. The real strategies. The NITTY & THE GRITTY. That felt crazy. So on June 25th, I'm talking to brands who've done it, AND the team that makes them happen. Both sides of the story. Free & virtual. Come hang out! --> Register for INSIDE MODERN SPONSORSHIPS GIG 'EM In 2023, 1 of America's largest universities asked a random sample of Americans what words they associated with their school. The most common answer? “Football.” And…..nothing else. This is the story of how they dealt with it by stealing from the consumer Marketing playbook, and redefining how to think about higher education Marketing in the process.  Yes I'm wearing the hat, but go Bearcats forever. Never say I’m not committed to the bit. How Texas A&M Makes Higher Education Go ViralIn 2023, the new (and first-ever) CMO of a university commissioned some research. He wanted to know what people thought when they heard "Texas A&M University." The answers came back in 5 words. Football. Nothing. Sports. Aggies. Agriculture. Yep. The second-most-common thing people associated with A&M was…NOTHING. For context, Texas A&M has 80,000 students, 600,000 alumni, and 16 colleges. Their annual budget is in the BILLIONS. They have research in medicine, national defense, space, and the ocean floor. They’re 150 years old. And 40% of the country either hadn’t heard of them beyond football, or had no opinion at all.  Can’t even fit the whole thing in the picture R. Ethan Braden was that new, first-ever CMO. He started asking everyone 1 question: In 5 years, what do we WANT those words to be? What happened next violated a lot of old higher-education Marketing norms. And it involves SXSW, NASCAR, YouTube, and MrBeast. Let’s get into it. Back to SchoolA&M didn’t have a formal CMO before Braden, but it’s not like they didn’t Market themselves. They went to South by Southwest, renting a yearly “Aggie house,” throwing parties, spending real money. The events they threw were always packed. But they were packed with …other Aggies. Students and alumni, people who already loved the school.  Aggies are NOT casual about their fandom, FYI A&M was preaching to the choir. The choir was full (and dressed in maroon), but the pews were empty. That was Braden’s mission when he showed up in 2023: reaching people who weren’t ALREADY huge fans. He came to A&M in 2023 from Purdue, where he'd spent 5 years as CMO & won them a spot on Fast Company’s Brands That Matter list. Before that: Eli Lilly. Years of pharmaceutical Marketing, which is not a place where you can get away with a vibes-based strategy (understatement LOL). Asking AroundHis first move at A&M was...nothing. Just…asking questions. Observing. For months, he attended the major events at the school. Going behind the scenes. From the Cadets Corps to the Aggie Band to attending Muster, the solemn day Aggies worldwide gather to recognize classmates who passed that year.  An A&M Muster ceremony Braden was trying to understand what this place even WAS, before he said anything about where it should go next. To find out what makes a brand worth talking about, first you have to listen to what's being said. Lesson: before you can be interesting, you have to be interested. Survey Says: Uh OhBraden commissioned formal ethnographic research, something he’d done back at Lilly. So, not a survey, but conversations. With the whole A&M community. Alumni, students, parents, faculty. Sort of like what he was doing on campus, but at scale. 6 themes came back: Texas-sized opportunity. Purpose and impact. Selfless leadership. “We not me” community. Real-world application. Student-first culture. They synthesized these into 3 words: Magnitude. Momentum. Mission. The platform they came up with? “A FORCE FOR GOOD.”  Omg it’s Reveille. Be cool you guys. The line: “While some strive to be the best in the world, Texas A&M stands to be the best FOR the world.” 1 different word, insta-differentiation. Ship Fast & Figure it OutThe full platform launch was 10 months from being ready. But when they saw an opportunity, they didn’t wait for everything to be ready. They ran with it. In 2024, they ran a bridge campaign (the “Values Campaign”), built around A&M’s core values.  The commercial had to do 2 things:
It aired on multiple platforms, including during the 2024 football season. It became the most-watched higher education video on YouTube in 2024. 25 million YouTube views. 54 million TV views. For context: the commercial that had been sitting on A&M's YouTube for 3 years before had 40,000 views. It was still the same school, the same values they’d always had. But now they were telling the story in a way everybody could understand. PUT INTO PRACTICEHere’s the exercise Braden ran in every presentation. 1️⃣. The 5 word test. Ask 5 people OUTSIDE your company what words come to mind when they hear your brand. Make it your ICP. Write down exactly what they say. Including “nothing.” 2️⃣. The 5 words you WANT. If your brand was working exactly as intended, what would you WANT a stranger to associate with your brand in 5 years? Write them down, and be specific. Ask key people at your brand, and see if they’re aligned. 3️⃣. Make this gap your north star. The 5 words you want are now your Marketing job. Every campaign, channel, and partnership should ladder into closing the gap. Ask: am I reaching people who already love this brand? Or people who haven’t found it yet? Your loyal base is key, but growing it is existential. What ChangedThe Aggie House at SXSW was the old strategy, miniaturized: keep existing Aggies engaged, succeed wildly, repeat. Braden said A&M’s YouTube had the same pattern. On all their socials. All the comments. The people who loved the brand were LOCKED IN. The people they needed to reach? Locked out. But he also saw how much potential there was.  There were countless stories worth telling inside their school. The real problem was surfacing, packaging, and distributing them. He compared it to drilling for oil. (This is Texas after all, LOL) You can see the results on their YouTube channel.
Before this, only 1 A&M video ever crossed 1M views, and it took 13 YEARS to do it. My favorite metric is that 80-92% of viewers come from outside Texas. It's EXTRA-crazy stat when you consider 95% of A&M's undergrads are Texans. That’s how you know they’re telling stories that resonate, even off-campus. Putting the Experts on Speed DialAnother source of untapped oil they identified: A&M’s 4,300 faculty members. Inside that group were world-class experts and researchers who were basically invisible to national media. So Braden’s team built a thought-leadership operation around pitching them. They carefully paired the right experts with the right outlets, at the right moments. David Anderson, 1 agricultural economist at A&M had 233 earned media placements in FY2024. In 2025: 3,500. Total earned media for A&M (not counting athletics) was up 83% in 2025. The Choir Problem, SolvedNow, don’t let me catch anyone saying it’s not important to stay engaged with the people who already love you. Your loyal fans are the best asset you have, and they should be treated that way. But when everyone else has no idea what you stand for, you need to multitask. Look at what A&M did with their SXSW strategy.  They ditched the “Aggie House” and instead built an integrated sponsorship/collaboration with the Fast Company activation. Open to all attendees, with real reasons for them to come, no matter how they felt (or didn't) about Texas A&M. They "co-created" a whole day alongside Fast Company: 6 panels, a morning activation, a live performance. It was so successful, they ran it back in 2026. The same logic went into their collabs with NASCAR and IndyCar. 80 million fans, very few of them already Aggies, but all of them brand-loyal and highly-likely to align with A&M’s outlined values, like their history with veterans and military families.  Same logic with their Dude Perfect collab (founded at A&M, but with a YouTube audience that didn’t overlap with A&M’s base).  MrBeast Enters the ChatIn late 2023, 2 students from a campus org called BUILD were trying to do donor outreach. They literally started sending DMs to philanthropy leaders. In their words, it was a total Hail Mary. One of the DMs was to MrBeast. And he snagged that Hail Mary for a touchdown, with 1 response: “Yeah, why not?” A&M started a partnership with Beast Philanthropy to produce 5 fully-outfitted, portable clinics, and sending them to their destinations around the world. This spring he announced it in a video. With a partnership to make it even bigger.  The lesson: if you tell stories well enough, your choir starts singing even when you’re not in the room. That creates opportunities that build on themselves. You can see it in the numbers. 📺 YouTube: 311,000 views (2023) --> 30 million (2024) --> 120 million total since August 2024 🏆 Fast Company Brands That Matter, 2025: Only university on the list, sitting next to Nike, Netflix, Coca-Cola, McDonald's 🏅 Fast Company Most Innovative Companies: 2 years running, 2025 and 2026 📰 Earned media: up 83% year-over-year (ex-athletics)  MARKETING CHEAT SHEET (WHAT TO LEARN FROM THIS STORY): 1️⃣. Preaching to the choir alone isn’t a strategy. A&M had an Aggie house, an alumni YouTube channel, and an SXSW presence. All of it was working great…for people who already loved the school. Before every campaign, every channel, and every partnership, ask whether you’re spending ONLY on people who are already converted to your brand, or will your story resonate with people who aren’t yet? The answer will tell you whether you're building a brand or just maintaining one. 2️⃣. To build a platform that resonates, push on open doors. The A&M didn’t pull “Force for Good” out of thin air. They got it from the ethnographic research, from the words of people who loved the brand. They had to recognize that it would stretch beyond the student base, but once they knew their grounding, they synthesized it into a platform for the entire university’s brand to grow on. That’s what pushing on an open door looks like in Marketing. 3️⃣. Distribution is a creative decision. And vice-versa. A&M’s Values Campaign commercial had a dual brief baked in from day 1: reach people who'd never heard of A&M, while still resonating with the 600,000 who already loved it. That strategy shaped their commercial, how it was made, and what channels it ran on. The same applies to NASCAR/INndyCar and Dude Perfect and SXSW: WHO you're trying to reach and HOW you're going to reach them need to be answered together. Sponsored by Community Zero-party data is the gold standard.  IN A MEME  Ahh, the bell has rung. Please be sure to do the reading (join me to talk about more sponsorships that break through). Off you go, passing period is only 11 minutes and there’s already a line at the vending machine that sells Reveille plushies. Until next time, Professor Millennial | ||||||||||||
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