Higher ed marketers and communicators are confronting heightened competition, rising economic anxiety, and growing public skepticism – while simultaneously constrained by cuts to budgets and personnel. Little wonder that austerity and anxiety are extinguishing inspiration and ambition, as campus leaders grow more risk-averse, and overworked marketing professionals grapple with disillusionment and burnout. The inevitable result is a proliferation of cliché, rote, and banal campaigns – but there are exceptions too! Amid darkness and gloom, genuinely creative ideas shine brighter than ever, sparking emotional reactions and providing a sense of direction and purpose. Despite the rise of glitzy generative AI tools, ultimately it is human inspiration, intuition, and insight that makes all the difference between campaigns that truly sparkle, and those that sputter.
In this lively keynote presentation, Ken Steele will share some shining examples of PSE campaigns that dazzle, and some that merely disappoint – as well as techniques to keep the creative spark alive and rekindle a sense of meaning and purpose, for yourself or your entire team.
Ken Steele
Ken Steele is Canada’s best-known higher ed futurist, speaker, facilitator, and consultant in branding, marketing and innovation. His wide-ranging perspective brings context to college and university strategic planning, positioning and enrolment management efforts, and has been shaped by award-winning careers as a Shakespeare scholar and instructor, technology consultant, brand strategist, entrepreneur, and de facto journalist.
Ken delivers conference keynotes, retreats, presentations and workshops to a broad range of audiences hundreds of times a year, from boards and senior administrators to faculty and support staff, student groups, concerned parents, government policy analysts, and Canada’s most powerful corporate CEOs. He sits on eCampus Ontario’s Virtual Learning Advisory Committee, and has consulted with hundreds of colleges and universities – from New England to New Zealand – helping them interpret market research, understand their competitive context, distill their institutional “Brand Chemistry,” and nurture a culture of innovation across campus.
Ken co-authored Canada’s first book on strategic enrolment management, and convenes three national roundtables of higher ed marketers. Some 30,000 viewers and readers have come to know him as a definitive source of breaking news, bright ideas, strategic foresight and thoughtful insight, through his daily and weekly newsletters and his video series Ten with Ken. In Fall 2022, Ken launched an exciting new virtual community for forward-looking higher ed professionals, Eduvation Circles, to provide real-time newsfeeds, resource collections, livestreams and masterclasses, and to allow the valuable conversations that start at his campus visits and conference presentations to continue year-round.