Escape Velocity with Tracey Halvorsen: Where Strategy Meets the Unexpected
Carol Keese - A CMO Says Marketing Isn't the Fix
Carol Keese has spent her career marketing trust in places where trust is the whole game: Johns Hopkins Medicine, Children's National, the University of Virginia, and now the University of Oregon. So when a CMO stands up and says marketing isn't the fix, it's worth listening. That's the argument at the center of this conversation. Carol wrote a piece in Inside Higher Ed called "Higher Education Was Built on Scarcity. That Model Is Breaking," and it cuts against her own profession. Her point: higher ed has spent two decades answering a value problem with better messaging, and the market stopped believing the message a long time ago. The work sits upstream, in the cost, the design, and the outcomes of the product. Not in the words on the homepage. Tracey and Carol get into where that leaves marketers, why medicine can't prestige-signal the way higher ed does, and what breaks when a thousand-year-old model built for the elite tries to serve everyone. Then the shift that's already here: a 17-year-old asks an AI about your school long before they ever reach your homepage, and whatever the AI says back is the new first impression. Carol calls it the first campus visit. The website is the second. Her team is rebuilding Oregon's site around that, writing for the machine that reads it first, which means short answers and FAQs instead of the long narrative pages the sector spent a decade building. She also argues that higher ed should stop walling itself off and act more like a consumer brand. Her proof point: Oregon's Grateful Ducks collaboration with Nike and the Grateful Dead, built on the band's real history in Eugene and Nike's roots at the university. It sold out fast and earned national coverage from Rolling Stone, GQ, Complex, USA Today, and Sports Business Journal. Authentic cultural relevance, not prestige signaling. It's a candid, specific, occasionally funny conversation about a sector under real pressure, from someone who loves it enough to tell it the truth. In this episode: Why "fix it with marketing" became higher ed's default, and why it stopped working The scarcity model: built for permanence, built for the elite, never built for scale What medicine gets right that higher ed doesn't, and why outcomes are the difference UVA vs. Oregon: professionalizing a legacy brand vs. defining a value proposition from scratch AI as the first campus visit, and how that reshapes web content, FAQs, and earned media Why rankings are a lagging indicator and what to measure instead (real-time sentiment) The CMO seat: getting it is not the point, what you do with it is Getting lighter: delight as a marketing strategy for institutions that take themselves too seriously Acting like a consumer brand: the Grateful Ducks collab, and why authentic cultural relevance beats prestige signaling About the guest Carol Keese is VP of University Communications and CMO at the University of Oregon. Before Oregon, she led brand and marketing at the University of Virginia through a bicentennial, a new president, and a capital campaign. Earlier in her career she held marketing leadership roles at Johns Hopkins Medicine and Children's National. She has presented on higher ed marketing at the AMA, the AAU, and SXSWEdu. Links Carol Keese on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolpkeese Carol's Inside Higher Ed article, "Higher Education Was Built on Scarcity. That Model Is Breaking": https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/call-action/2026/05/04/higher-ed-was-built-scarcity-model-breaking Blanding: https://blandingaudit.netlify.app
