OPM Marketing Challenges

Neil: I'm interested as well in a slightly different angle, because I guess the danger in this conversation is, we're focusing on all the challenges that universities face, and I think that's absolutely the case. But I suppose what we're not doing is saying, well, are the OPMs doing this well?

I'm just interested in, because there's a danger that we present the alternative as being amazing. And I just, I was interested in are they evolving, improving, because for me, sometimes I think, well, there's a playbook and how is that playbook evolving over time?

Morgan: Well, I think it's all over the map, know, certainly they make mistakes, you know, they've had some issues. There also is at times a playbook where an OPM will market something aggressively and then really back off after a while and so trying to keep that marketing consistent is one thing.

But they're all over the map. mean, I know some of some disasters with OPMs, like one program where they spent $300,000 to recruit eight students to a master's program.

Phil: If I had to generalize, they're good at the speed issue and oftentimes to their own detriment. In their bones, they know it's how quickly can you set up landing pages that give the right information and how quickly can you say, ‘that's not working, let's modify it.’ They're very good with that in general. I think they know how to reply back to students very quickly, even if it's Saturday at 11 p.m.

But I would note two things where they're not doing it well. One is they got too used to that speed issue and they're annoying, and then people get harassed forever. I mean, I get harassed just when I'm doing web research on either for-profit schools or OPM-supported programs, because I think they both have a very similar approach. And so they are not good at realizing, ‘we've gone too far into harassing and pushing and just being annoying, and we need to back off.’

And that could reflect very badly on the institutional brand and there's not an awareness of it. So that's one of, think, the fundamental weaknesses of OPM marketing in general, or their recruitment, trying to follow up with students.

The other thing, I don't see very creative uses of AI yet to figure out. Listen, the cost of digital marketing is going up. Ad words are going up. It's an industry, everybody knows it, not just in EdTech. And it's unsustainable. You can't just keep pumping money to Google or to Facebook or Instagram. There's gotta be, to use a bad term from 15 years ago, a bending of the cost curve, a different way to try to solve this.

And I think that currently OPMs are too much relying on their playbook and not enough rethinking things, particularly with Gen AI. What could we do to really change how effective we are and how much money flows to advertising versus being more effective in a different way?

Morgan: Yeah, I don't think we've seen a lot of real innovation since the early days of 2U in a way, I would say. So there's use of AI, but it's about things like writing copy and things like that. Not a lot of really fundamental shifts, I would say.

Neil: And I think I feel like that's why I see over here as well that there's a sense of, to kind of take Phil's point, there's that sense of how sustainable this playbook is over time really and the extent to which they invest in this playbook is probably making it harder for them. And there's not that innovation and that change.

It's interesting also to just think about the kind of the differences, because I worked with a university recently who'd come out of an OPM partnership and was doing marketing and recruitment in-house. It's just interesting to how they modified certain things, particularly in relation to what you were saying, Phil, around this idea that you sign the lead capture form, you've got phone calls, you've got myriad emails. I think they watered that down a little bit, or they modified over time their approaches. And I think that the phone calling thing, I think is an interesting difference between our two nations. I think in general people in the UK, the kind of what was it, Southern New Hampshire's kind of seven seconds and they're on a call. I think that genuinely doesn't land as well in the UK as it might do in the US. Maybe it doesn't even land well in the US.

But I'm interested just to take that example. Do you see the merit in a university going with an OPM for this kind of stuff, or an external marketing agency, to actually learn the playbook themselves. Because that's a question. That's a question that I get asked across the whole spectrum. How effective is a partnership in building up the competence internally to then when that comes to an end be able to do it yourself. What's your take on that?

Phil: It certainly can be done. One argument that it's a good approach is if you don't have a program that's self-sustaining, profitable, well, you don't have something to market in the first place, so you're not going to have the opportunity to shift it in-house. So you need to build up demand, student demand by itself.

The other thing is, and I know that we have some differences and country-wise differences, but here the schools have to approve everything. And part of the difficulty is even getting them to approve the copy that the partner is going to use. And the fact that you're in a relationship and getting that is just an ongoing basis of ‘We're going to try this. We're sending this out. Could you guys approve this? Give us markups before we send this out.’

Schools have the opportunity just to see, ‘wow, this is how often you have to do it. These are the types of questions. I see how much this is focused on the student and not the brand per se.’ So I think there's an opportunity for this to be a good path to move it into an institutional capability that's in-house.

But not many OPMs are set up where they're going to make that easy, or part of the critical path. They don't see it as their job, pushing the university to learn how to do it in-house. So I think there's an opportunity, but not a push from this. It takes your own initiative.