833: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with Adam Pierno, Managing Director, Brand Strategy, Arizona State University

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to ed-up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Dr. Joe Sallustio with you here on another episode of the EdUp Experience. In fact, I recorded an episode not too long ago, came right off that episode, jumped into a panel here at Insights EDU, did the hour-long panel, and jumped back out. I've got an amazing guest for you. And I mean amazing because we don't stop. We just keep going here at the EdUp Experience. Of course, we're at the Insights EDU conference put on by Education Dynamics talking about all things online student recruitment. And I want to bring my guest in right now. Ladies and gentlemen, he has a few things to say about marketing. He's Adam Pierno. He is Managing Director of Brand Strategy at Arizona State University. Adam, what's going on?

Adam Pierno: Hey Joe, how are you? Thanks so much for having me.

Joe Sallustio: I'm honored to have you here, my friend. You're kind of doing some innovative things over there at ASU.

Adam Pierno: We are known for our innovation, that's for sure. Just a few innovative things.

Joe Sallustio: We were honored to have Michael Crow with us on this podcast on episode 400 a long time ago. We're on episode 800 and something now, so it was a bit back, but he's always the inspiration and the model for, I think, what innovation looks like at the president level. Talk first to us about Arizona State University, the innovation that takes place on the campus and what your role is in helping to facilitate that innovation.

Adam Pierno: Yeah, so it's really interesting because yesterday I was lucky enough to give a presentation at Insights EDU about how brand strategy impacts digital experiences and content. And interestingly, I start with our charter. Our charter is all about judging ourselves and holding ourselves accountable by the number of people we include in ASU and how they succeed. I show that because we don't do innovation for innovation's sake. We refer to it as one of our design aspirations as principled innovation. It means that we're always trying to push the boundaries of how far we can go to achieve that charter. Like where are the lines of what's responsible, what's ethical, but also how are we going to achieve the scale that we want to make that charter a reality so more people have access to the high-quality education that they deserve in America and around the world?

So innovation is rooted in the charter. Everything we do, therefore – I mean, I always say ASU is a "yes" organization. So be careful what you wish for, be careful what you present to your leader, because they're going to say yes. It's amazing.

Joe Sallustio: It's know what you're asking for and be specific, right?

Adam Pierno: Be specific and have a plan. Are you sure you really want that? Or does it just sound like a fun thing to think about? Even sometimes an idea that you may come up with in a meeting could turn into a project, which is exciting. I love it.

So as far as innovation goes from a brand perspective, I think in addition to all the things we do in education, technology, outreach, student success – all the things we do from an innovation aspect there – we follow that in brand strategy. We're bringing in principles and ideas, techniques from outside higher ed and applying them in a higher ed context so that we are a university that has a brand platform that's defined, that's tested and validated with more than 20 different constituencies and really make sure that everything we're saying is resonating, is differentiating, is compelling to those audiences that are most important to us.

Joe Sallustio: You know, your role is unique. A lot of institutions, maybe size-wise, don't have a director of any kind of brand strategy. Brand strategy is a component of overall marketing, the marketing department. When you get to a certain point, brand placement, brand strategy, the way you communicate the brand or the way you design it, all of those aspects are communicating something to a student, to alumni, to government agencies. How do you decide where to put the brand and how to communicate the brand? What does this process look like at ASU?

Adam Pierno: It's an interesting question because not only are there very few universities that have as robust of a brand – we call it the brand team, enterprise brand strategy and management – that is a dedicated group of full-timers dedicated to the brand and the work around the brand, we are also separate from the enrollment workflow. So there are whole other bodies of work that happen. That was decided early on that we should keep these things separate so it doesn't become – I think it's easy for a marketing organization to get beholden to one KPI. In the case of higher ed, student enrollment would be the most important thing. So having that space and that buffer is really important.

When we talk about how to decide where the brand becomes critical to be expressed, we're looking at where we can provide foundational knowledge, air support, we would call it, air cover. So when the key enrollment periods are on, that's where we're looking at our brand campaigns. And we're thinking about where mass media could be really effective or where we need to be more tactical and be really smart about where brand messages are going.

Joe Sallustio: Do you have almost like a cadence that you follow?

Adam Pierno: Yeah, we have cadences for all the research that we do around the brand. Some of it's biannual, some of it's semi-annual, some of it's annual. And we'll try to make sure that the next campaign is informed by the message testing and then we're testing the next messages ahead of the next campaign. So we have a fall campaign that informs the early application process and fall applicants. And then the bulk of our campaign comes on in that really January through April sweet spot where most of the applications are happening. That is both to reinforce our excellence with guidance counselors, parents of prospects, but also the applicants themselves.

Our messages are really up here. They're about communicating our quality. They're about communicating the benefit to the community that ASU is making in all the communities that we serve. And then reinforcing, always reinforcing. So our consistency, I would say, is unheard of. I mean, the level – I've worked on, I was in-house at Verizon for a little while before I came here. And even among Verizon, I would say our brand consistency is much more consistent and solid, even with the decentralized model that we have.

Joe Sallustio: That's a heck of a comparison because Verizon, I mean, you know, Verizon put a lot of money into their marketing and branding for years and years and years. Colors, schemes, I mean, the commercials, everything. Talk to me about how you're using this, if at all – artificial intelligence.

Adam Pierno: Yeah, so we are exploring artificial intelligence. Our enterprise technology group is spearheading a whole body of work around it. So we signed last month the first agreement with OpenAI to have an enterprise, a higher ed enterprise agreement.

Joe Sallustio: You were the first.

Adam Pierno: Yeah, we were the first. And we do that a lot. They are leading along with Ed Plus, our technology group that is focused on learning, a program to offer kind of mini grants for mini programs to build out a body of work even beyond what we're already doing. So faculty – I also happen to be adjunct faculty at the Cronkite School. And I got an invitation, like, do you have an idea for how AI could benefit your students in taking your class or other classes? So I can apply for this grant, which would give me access to so many hours of compute. So I'm contemplating that now. My class starts in two weeks, so I'm not sure if I'll have time to put together something meaningful enough. I may have to wait for next cycle, but that's how innovation works.

We get something at the very top and they say right away, how do we get this to students directly? And how do we make a process that the people who are hand to hand, eye to eye with those students have already thought through, this will be an immediate benefit and we can test it and have a case that we can report back up. So that happens at scale. It's really remarkable. So being exposed to it both as a marketer, yeah, but as a faculty member and seeing the inner workings of it is just so inspiring.

Joe Sallustio: So you were here at Insights EDU giving a presentation. What brought you here? Why did you attend the conference? What were you hoping to do and learn and gain here outside of your session?

Adam Pierno: Well, a lot of my colleagues from EdPlus and ASU Online were there as well. So they were talking up the Insights EDU conference as something they go to annually. Lots of insights, lots of things to learn there. So even, I mean, we have people that I consider experts in their various areas of work who came out of sessions and were like, "Whoa, I can't believe I just learned that." So there was a session concurrent to the one I presented. There was one on Salesforce and our team that works really deeply in Salesforce came out really impressed by that session.

For me, I got to hear a panel on trends yesterday. I got to hear our friends from LinkedIn and Google do a session that did touch a lot on AI. I know it's a hot topic, but they were all just looking out at the future state and some of the perils of digital marketing, some of the challenges that were coming up with different privacy initiatives that are taking shape and how everybody needs to prepare for those, which is something we're already working on here. I'm sure everybody listening to this too is scratching their head and trying to make a plan for how to address some of the information and data sets that we're going to lose going into next year.

Joe Sallustio: That's for sure. What keeps you fresh? I mean, you've got a very important, I'm going to say it's priceless brand that you're communicating. ASU is one of the biggest brands in higher ed. I mean it's one of the biggest brands out there. It's a flagship. It's known to be the most innovative university out there with an innovative president. The OpenAI thing, I mean, it's not the first time ASU's been at the front, let's just be honest.

Adam Pierno: No, it's true.

Joe Sallustio: So you're handling this priceless brand. How do you stay fresh in marketing and brand strategy? What are you listening to? What are you reading? What are you watching? What keeps you going?

Adam Pierno: Well, two points. One thing that keeps us all fresh here – I think our team is about 50 people and they're 50 people that I would put up against any ad agency in the country. And they're just experts at everything they do. Every part of our organization. We know the people listening to this show probably have already been influenced by hearing from President Crow or reading headlines, and they have already learned about the ASU brand. We know we have a lot more work to do to get – you know, I watch TV with my family and my daughter was watching, God, I think it was "The Summer I Turned Pretty" maybe, and they made a joke about the kid who wants to go to ASU and everybody laughs at him because he got into Stanford. It's like, you know what? They didn't get our message. Our message has not gotten all the way to that person who wrote that, the person, the producer, the line producer who said like, "Yeah, yeah, let's record that. It's funny." So that means we have work to do. We can still advance this message. We can get this message further. And then that's something else that inspires us.

In terms of inspiration, I think we have – ASU has been aggressive about, we get the best and the brightest from higher ed, yes. And we hire top tier deans and faculty and staff that have experience, but they're also not afraid to hire people like me that come from outside of higher ed. I come from the agency world. The original CMO here came from Coca-Cola and multi-unit restaurant experience. And that's... When we hire people from outside, I just added a brand manager who has more direct retail experience instead of higher ed. It's not because there's something wrong with higher ed, but it's because we want fresh approaches. We want different ways to think of it. I want someone who looks confused when I'm saying, "Well, this is how we did it last time." I like when they say like, "Well, why though? Here's another way you could do it." And I think that that gives everybody the opportunity to stay fresh. If you have to explain something like it's the first time through that beginner's mind, you have no choice but to go back to first principles and say like, "Yeah, I guess two years later that really doesn't – we don't need to do it that way now that I think about it." We can reset and find a better way to do it.

Joe Sallustio: So I was just talking about that in a session panel I was on over here at Insights EDU, we were talking about using other industries. You know how do you stay fresh in higher ed? You've got to keep comparing it to other industries. You know, I said, "You know, you remember that time, Adam, in the last month when you walked into your bank? You know, no, you don't remember because you didn't walk into your bank. You didn't walk in there. But you could have moved $10,000 between your accounts in about two seconds." I mean, I say 10,000. I didn't move that much, but maybe you have. But there are people all across this country that move money between bank accounts with no problem, they never go into a bank, it's their money, it's their experience with that. And the Netflix example, right? For those of us that watch Netflix, we were watching Netflix last night and I was watching last night and the intro comes on. Not only do I want streaming video when I want it, but I don't want to watch the intro. I want to get right to the content. So I skip intro button. It's frictionless, so you're not forcing me to do anything. If you keep comparing higher ed to other industries, it becomes very easy to assimilate to what exists.

Adam Pierno: I always point out in the early 2010s, when Uber was reaching critical mass, everybody in digital commerce, everybody with a website, their scores, their SAT scores got blown up because everybody was like, wait a minute, it's two clicks to do this? I can order a cab that shows up here in minutes? Why can't you make it this easy? And that lowered bar, that higher expectation on the part of prospective students or current students or alumni or parents who want the thing they want now, that impacts us all. And that frictionless experience provides a kind of a carrot and a stick for us. It's something to be afraid of if we're not delivering. I think luckily at ASU, I believe we are delivering. But also the stick of, OK, when the next not just the next bright shiny thing, but when the next real benefit to user experience or brand experience or student experience comes, how are we adapting? How are we receiving it? And then incorporating it into our brand or our experiences, as it should be translated through the prism of ASU, not just a copy-paste of what's working somewhere else, whether it's finance or dining or whatever the category is.

Joe Sallustio: Bullseye. I want you to leave us, Adam, with the best advice. What is the secret, the best advice you can give us other higher-ed marketers on how we can up our game? How can we be innovators? What do we need to be thinking about? What's on the horizon? What's your best advice? I mean, you've been in the higher-ed game for a little while. You come from outside higher-ed. Maybe the best advice you could give us is, what did you bring from the outside that you applied to higher-ed that maybe if we grew up in higher-ed, we wouldn't know about?

Adam Pierno: I would say a piece of advice, something we've been doing for the past two or three years that has served us very well is being very intentional about documenting our shared work. So I'm on one team, the brand team. There are nearly a hundred other business units that are communicating on behalf of the university independently, but as a federated model of brand communication. So we started producing a document called the ad library. So any paid advertisement gets published into this book. I have a copy of one half of it here. It is the size of a phone book. And through that documentation, we get to flip through it and see where there's opportunities for improvement in the following year or where there's a brand guide that could be clarified and could be strengthened for better consistency or where we haven't communicated very clearly. We thought we were saying this, but people have read it this way.

So that has allowed us – we've just produced the third volume and that has allowed us to better serve the other communicators at the university who are trying to do amazing work. They are doing amazing work. They're trying to push the boundaries and innovate. They have access to this library too, so they can be inspired or they can tag us and say like, "Hey, I found this thing, this looks off to me," which I love getting a comment like that, because I'm the one who approved it and let it through. So I'm like, "You're right, that is off. Here's what it should be, here's how we could fix it going forward." But there's so many positives from that, from documenting and sharing.

Joe Sallustio: So the advice is, even when you're putting out stuff, you have to always review. You always have to be looking for opportunity to improve. And it can't just be you. Even if you're on a small marketing team, perhaps there's others that have a good marketing eye within your institution that you can call upon. It takes a village, right? This is not a managing director of brand strategy. Adam does all this work, and it's his vision. Everybody has a part to play.

Adam Pierno: Absolutely. I mean, I'm not even the top person here. I have a chief brand officer who I report to, Jill Andrews, who's an amazing visionary for brand, understands the ASU brand. But we document this thing. We publish it. We send a copy to Michael Crow. He sends back a version the next week with sticky notes in it that say what he was questioning about. He literally did with this one. How do more people see this one? How can we share this idea? And I'm accountable.

You know, I love getting that kind of feedback and it's so refreshing and a little terrifying to have President Crow reading at that level and sharing that kind of detail that makes me get up early the next day and come into work like supercharged that, oh yeah, okay, that guy cares. He has really important things to be doing, but he cared enough to look at my work and give me comments. On 1200 pages, he gave me comments. That's pretty good validation. Even if the comments are critical of your work, you can't help but be proud that person dedicated that time to improve the work for the next year.

So I think for branding, the magic word for branding is consistency and commitment. And we have that in spades. I mean, up and down, every communicator has bought into the benefit of having a solid brand and having that consistency. So it's wonderful to have such a strong community of people that pull together to get that message advanced.

Joe Sallustio: That is amazing advice. Ladies and gentlemen, you heard him here on the EdUp Experience podcast. His name is Adam Pierno. He is Managing Director of Brand Strategy at Arizona State University, one of the most innovative universities in the world. And don't take my word for it. Basically a lot of people say that. So it's just true.

Adam, thanks for being on the podcast. We had a good time, too.

Adam Pierno: Thank you for your time, Joe. I really appreciate being here. Thank you for making special time for me. I know you got your hands full. Your voice must be just about to give out. So go get yourself some hydration there for your throat.

Joe Sallustio: You know I will. Ladies and gentlemen, you just ed-upped.