Registration for this event is free!
This free virtual conference is designed for professionals shaping how institutions connect with prospective students, current learners, and alumni. This event explores modern approaches to enrollment marketing, brand positioning, and audience engagement in an increasingly competitive and digital-first landscape. Through interactive sessions and case-driven discussions, attendees will gain practical insights to strengthen institutional visibility, credibility, and impact across the student lifecycle.
Key Takeaways:
- Learn proven strategies for enrollment, recruitment, and retention in a changing higher education environment
- Explore how institutions are using data, storytelling, and digital channels to strengthen their brand and reach prospective students
- Gain insights on building trust with students, families, and stakeholders through authentic, mission-driven marketing
- Hear from higher education marketers and thought leaders navigating real-world challenges
- Walk away with actionable ideas you can apply across admissions, communications, and marketing teams
Can’t attend every session? No problem. All conference sessions will be available on-demand for 6 months after the event!
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
April 7, 2026 | 10:00 a.m. CT
“In an Age of Doubt, Build Belief: How Higher Ed Marketing Can Strengthen Trust, Distinction, and Demand”
R. Ethan Braden
Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Texas A&M University
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
April 8, 2026 | 10:00 a.m. CT
“Indispensable: The New Architecture of Marketing Leadership in Higher Ed”
Bill Campbell
Vice President of Operations & Communications, Chatham University
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
April 8, 2026 | 10:00 a.m. CT
“Indispensable: The New Architecture of Marketing Leadership in Higher Ed”
Jenny Petty
Vice President Industry Relations and Advisory Services,
SimpsonScarborough
Day 1 | ALL TIMES IN CT
In an Age of Doubt, Build Belief: How Higher Ed Marketing Can Strengthen Trust, Distinction, and Demand
Higher education marketing is no longer just about promotion (if it ever was!). It is about helping institutions earn belief in a skeptical, distracted, digital-first environment. At a time when many Americans question the value of a degree, marketers have a larger responsibility and opportunity: to make institutional value visible, credible, and memorable across the student lifecycle. In this keynote, Ethan Braden will explore how higher ed marketers can move beyond tactics alone to build trust, sharpen distinction, and create demand through clearer positioning, stronger storytelling, and more disciplined brand-building. Attendees will leave with practical ideas to better connect mission to market, communicate value with greater precision, and elevate the role of marketing on their campuses.
R. Ethan Braden
Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Texas A&M University
Orchestrating the Student Lifecycle: Distributed Marketing Strategies for Engagement From Prospect to Alumni
Today’s institutions must manage a continuous, data-informed relationship with students that begins long before enrollment and extends well beyond graduation. From recruiting prospective students to nurturing enrolled learners and activating alumni communities, lifecycle engagement is no longer a series of disconnected campaigns—it is a coordinated strategy.
This session explores how a distributed marketing model enables higher education institutions to strategically engage students at every stage of their journey. We’ll examine how Emma’s distributed marketing platform empowers central teams to maintain brand governance, message consistency, and compliance while equipping departments, colleges, and advancement teams with the tools to execute locally relevant communications.
Bradley Cason
Director of Product Management, Emma by Marigold
Nate Gallagher
Director of Professional Services, Emma by Marigold
Striking Content Gold: How Colorado School of Mines Unearthed a Smarter Way to Manage Digital Assets
The marketing team at the Colorado School of Mines faced growing challenges managing a rapidly expanding library of photos, videos, and brand assets. Content was scattered across multiple Cloud platforms and individual desktops, making it difficult for the central marketing and creative team to find, share, and repurpose content efficiently — let alone provide other departments and programs with up to date, brand approved content of their own. These fragmented systems led to version confusion, inconsistent branding, and time-consuming bottlenecks for staff across the university. To regain control and scale their content operations, Mines implemented a digital asset management (DAM) platform to serve as the single source of truth for all their content.
This central hub not only streamlined creative workflows, it also empowered campus partners to self-serve those approved assets on demand — reducing reliance on one-off requests and manual file transfers. In this session, learn how the university modernized its content and creative operations and martech stack to achieve measurable efficiency gains.
You’ll see how Mines:
- Centralized assets and improved collaboration by consolidating multiple storage tools into one organized, searchable, secure system.
- Enabled faster access to content through AI-powered search and facial recognition, reducing file retrieval times from hours (or days) to seconds.
- Empowered teams across campus with self-service access to approved images, videos, and graphics, minimizing bottlenecks and tedious asset requests.
- Enhanced brand consistency by ensuring everyone uses the latest, on-brand materials for marketing and communications.
- Measured real impact through significant time savings, increased content reuse, and improved creative output.
Ariana Keil
Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Canto
Day 2 | ALL TIMES IN CT
Keynote | Indispensable: The New Architecture of Marketing Leadership in Higher Ed
Higher education marketing has never operated in a more complex institutional environment. Rapid shifts in enrollment, funding, policy, and public trust have created a landscape where decisions made in finance, academics, enrollment, facilities, and communications are deeply interdependent — yet rarely made in concert. Marketing and communications leaders are increasingly being asked not just to execute campaigns, but to make sense of competing institutional priorities, translate complexity into coherent strategy, and connect dots across divisions that have historically operated in silos.
But for a growing number of senior leaders, that scope has expanded even further. Today’s CMO — or the leader who holds that function — is increasingly responsible for portfolios that extend well beyond marketing and communications into operations, student experience, and institutional planning. This expanded seat at the table brings both extraordinary opportunity and new demands for integrative leadership.
In this session, Bill Campbell and Jenny Petty, 2026 co-chairs for the AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education, will explore the evolving role of the senior marketing and communications leader as organizational sense maker and dot connector — and what true cross-functional alignment actually requires at this level of institutional complexity. Drawing on their own leadership experiences, including Bill’s oversight of both marketing communications and campus operations at Chatham University, they will examine why alignment breaks down, what it looks like when it works, and how leaders can position themselves as indispensable architects of institutional coherence.
Bill Campbell
Vice President of Operations & Communications, Chatham University
Jenny Petty
Vice President Industry Relations and Advisory Services SimpsonScarborough
More Than Merch: Using Promotional Products to Build Belonging in Higher Education
Colleges and universities must forge emotional connections as well as recruit students, using tangible touchpoints to foster loyalty. Strategic promotional products strengthen engagement and reflect institutional values throughout the student journey. This session shows how merchandise can support key milestones and offer actionable ideas for enrollment and alumni efforts.
Jessica Gibbons-Rauch, MBA, MAS
Professional Development Lead, PPAI
From Legacy to Leadership: Modernizing the Digital Campus Experience
Today’s students expect university digital experiences to work as seamlessly as the private-sector platforms they use every day. Yet many institutions are still operating on fragmented, costly legacy systems that slow down marketing teams, limit personalization, and create friction across the student lifecycle. In this 30-minute session, we’ll explore how higher education institutions can modernize their digital foundation to better support enrollment, recruitment, retention, and alumni engagement. We’ll dive into how to help institutions: Deliver intuitive, student-first digital experiences Reduce cost and complexity by consolidating legacy systems Empower marketing and admissions teams to move faster Prepare for AI-driven personalization and smarter search Modernization isn’t just a tech upgrade, it’s a strategic shift that strengthens institutional visibility, trust, and competitiveness in a digital-first enrollment landscape.
Travis Ralph
Principal Solutions Engineer (Public Sector / Financial Services Sector)
R. Ethan Braden
Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Texas A&M UniversityR. Ethan Braden is Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Texas A&M University, where he leads the strategy to position, promote, and protect America’s largest land grant university. Reporting to President Mark Welsh, a retired four-star general and former Chief of Staff for the United States Air Force, Ethan and his team are driving a rapid brand transformation—from new heights of national recognition to novel partnerships within NASCAR and IndyCar, at SXSW, and with Dude Perfect.
In under a year, Ethan’s team launched a new university-wide brand platform, produced video content generating 67 million YouTube views (up 20,000% vs. 2023), and helped Texas A&M become the only university named by Fast Company to its 2025 list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies.
Previously, as EVP and CMO at Purdue University and Purdue Global, Ethan helped turn the institution into a marketing powerhouse, transcending the higher education space in becoming a three-time Fast Company “Brand That Matters” and landing Purdue ahead of NASA and Disney on their Most Innovative Companies list, #1 in the Education category. He has spoken at Salesforce’s Dreamforce and Connections conferences, AdWeek’s Brandweek, Google Marketing Live, and keynoted at Content Marketing World. His work has been recognized in Ad Age, The Washington Post, Morning Brew, and NPR, which reported, “if there is a top dog in higher ed marketing, it’s Ethan Braden.”
Named Content Marketer of the Year (B2C) in 2023 by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketer of the Year (Higher Education) in 2020 by the American Marketing Association, Ethan spent a decade at Eli Lilly & Company in marketing leadership roles, building billion-dollar brands including Cymbalta and Jardiance.
He holds a BA from Willamette University, an MBA from the University of Notre Dame, and lives in College Station, Texas, with his wife and three children. Previously, Ethan’s teams transformed Purdue University and Purdue Global’s marketing through emotive storytelling and team development, evidenced by Fast Company Magazine selecting Purdue University as a “Brand That Matters” 3 years in a row.
Ethan was named 2023 Content Marketer of the Year (Content Marketing Institute) and ‘Marketer of the Year’ for higher education in 2020 (AMA). Before Purdue, Ethan excelled at Lilly, helping to build billion-dollar brands including Cymbalta and Jardiance.
Bill Campbell
Vice President of Operations & Communications, Chatham UniversityBill Campbell is an award-winning marketing, technology, and communications leader skilled in creating a unique brand voice, building awareness, improving operations, and driving revenue. He serves as the vice president of operations and communications at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA where he provides strategic leadership and oversees all aspects of the Campus Services division, which includes Marketing & Communications, Information Technology, Facilities Management, Events & Conference Services, the Campus Gear Store, and the Post Office/Print Center. Joining Chatham in 2012 as the vice president of marketing and communications, Campbell helped lead the successful coed transition of Chatham’s 145-year-old undergraduate women’s college and served as the interim vice president of enrollment management. In 2015, he was honored with the American Marketing Association’s Higher Education Marketer of the Year for his team’s efforts. Before Chatham, he worked for over a decade at a brand and marketing agency in North Carolina, culminating in his role as the vice president of brand strategy. He began his career in the nonprofit sector as the director of annual giving and operations for the V Foundation for Cancer Research. He holds a B.A. from the University of Illinois and an MBA from Western Governors University (WGU).
Bradley Cason
Director of Product Management, Emma by MarigoldBradley leads product strategy and execution for Emma, Marigold’s email marketing platform, driving innovation that fuels growth, strengthens customer impact, and delivers measurable business outcomes. He brings over 15 years of experience in CRM and email marketing, with deep expertise in building scalable marketing technology solutions that empower distributed teams and unlock performance at scale. Based in the Pacific Northwest, he’s a father of five who’s always experimenting with emerging tech trends—and is ultimately driven by a simple passion: finding the best doughnuts.
Nate Gallagher
Director of Professional Services, Emma by MarigoldNate Gallagher is the Director of Professional Services at Emma, where he has spent nearly nine years helping organizations get the most out of their email marketing programs. Nate began his time at Emma on the Support team, giving him a strong, hands-on understanding of the platform that he still brings to his work today.
Jessica Gibbons-Rauch, MBA, MAS
Professional Development Lead, PPAIJessica “JGR” Gibbons-Rauch, MBA, CAS, is the professional development lead at PPAI. She has over 15 years of experience working in the promotional products industry as a distributor and service provider before joining PPAI. She is also an adjunct professor in the MBA and Digital Marketing programs at Northern Illinois University. JGR was named a PPAI Rising Star in 2014. She has served on the board of PPAChicago (Now PPACW) and on the board of PromoKitchen.
Ariana Keil
Senior Growth Marketing Manager, CantoAriana Keil is the Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Canto, a provider of digital asset management software that helps teams organize, find, share, and analyze their digital content. With over 10 years of experience in both B2B sales and marketing at finance, agency, and software companies, she has an appreciation for GTM strategies that holistically target the entire buyer’s journey, and a passion for sales and marketing department collaboration. Always in search of a cogent narrative surrounding business challenges, she brings a storyteller’s viewpoint to contextualizing product-led solutions
Jenny Petty
Vice President Industry Relations and Advisory Services SimpsonScarboroughJenny Petty has over eight years of experience in marketing, communications, and enrollment management. Jenny currently serves as Vice President Industry Relations and Advisory Services at
SimpsonScarborough. Petty began their marketing career at IGT in 2012 as the Digital Marketing Manager/Brand Manager. In this role, they were responsible for developing the company’s social media strategy, expanding their Facebook audience, and assisting in two major rebrands. In 2015, Petty transitioned to the University of Wyoming as the Director of Enrollment Marketing. In this role, they led a team of marketers who collaborated with Admissions to fill the prospective student pipeline. Petty also oversaw the social and content marketing strategies, all media buying and campaign development. Jenny Petty has a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of Nevada, Reno. Jenny also has certification from LinkedIn in Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, as well as certification from HubSpot in Inbound Certification.
Travis Ralph
Principal Solutions Engineer (Public Sector / Financial Services Sector)Coach, security architect, and continuous learner who loves to build cloud based solutions that deliver customer results. This may be a proactive security assessment tool, threat library, BI dashboards, logging & monitoring automation, reference architecture, a wiki, or systems integratios. If it adds value and solves multiple customer’s need/wants, I want to build it!
