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Kevin Tyler
Okay, so folks, you may have noticed a bit of a trend in the last couple of episodes that we have rolled out of Higher Voltage. We’re focusing really on tech and innovation in the higher ed space. And this episode is no different. I am so happy to welcome Jennifer Lonchar to Higher Voltage. Jennifer brings almost two decades of experience and expertise to higher education, having worked in various roles focused on strategic enrollment and marketing.
For over 13 years, she worked for Carnegie and was instrumental in bringing digital marketing to higher education. Her deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities within the sector has made her a sought-after leader in developing innovative solutions for enrollment and student engagement. Driven by a passion for enhancing the student experience and optimizing recruitment strategies, Jennifer has co-founded AmbioEdu.
This venture reflects her commitment to transforming higher education marketing through advanced technologies, including performance TV and integrated digital solutions. AmbioEdu under her leadership harnesses cutting-edge tools to help universities connect with prospective students more effectively and efficiently, setting new standards in the field. Jen, welcome to Higher Voltage. I’m so excited to chat with you today.
Jennifer Lonchar
Oh my gosh, that is a mouthful, isn’t it?
Kevin Tyler
It was a lot, but it was all important. We had to cover it all.
Jennifer Lonchar
I was like man does it ever stop? I should just change it to “Jen knows her shit,” that’s it.
Kevin Tyler
Right, Jen knows. And here’s chapter two, chapter two, when she was eight years old. I’m just kidding.
Jennifer Lonchar
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. We are entering the new chapter.
Kevin Tyler
This is going to be great because I think our focus on technology and innovation, the timeliness of it right now couldn’t be more relevant. I think that of all the shifting kind of landscapes and social media and how TV is being used and media is being consumed and the necessity of evolution and innovation in higher ed now, it’s required. We are looking into a future that will not accommodate the ways in which we attracted and engaged audiences as we did in the past. And what you are doing and offering, I feel like is a really important step forward for higher education. So I’m really glad to have this conversation with you.
Jennifer Lonchar
Thank you. I’m super excited to be here. You’ll find as you talk to me about this that I can talk about it all day long. I think I’ve always kind of been like that with higher ed anyway. And when I’m super passionate about something, I was always like that with digital. I still am like that with digital where we can talk strategy all day about what do you need to do?
Kevin Tyler
Right.
Jennifer Lonchar
What’s going wrong? What are we doing as an industry? All the things.
Kevin Tyler
Right. Right. There’s plenty of opportunities to talk about all at once. For folks who might not be familiar with AmbioEdu, I’m wondering if you could just explain what it is, how it works, and how it’s different from traditional television advertising.
Jennifer Lonchar
Yeah, so for anyone that’s not familiar with Ambio, what we do is what’s called, Performance TV. And Performance TV is really, if you take your, if you think about streaming, so wherever you’re streaming, think about streaming on Hulu or Paramount or Peacock or Amazon Freebie, any of those, wherever you’re watching our shows and you’re streaming. What we’re doing is we’re taking commercials, first schools, universities, we’re putting them into the households across all devices within the house. There’s a couple of things that make us really different from I think the traditional CTV OTT space that we’ve all gotten accustomed to. And that is, that CTV OTT space is a very fragmented space, up until now. In that, if you wanted to go to Hulu, you have to go to Hulu and spend the money. If you want to go to Peacock or NBC Universal, you’ve got to go over here. If you want to go somewhere else, you’ve got to go over here. And when you have such a fragmented market like that, you can’t really optimize based on your goals and your audience because you’ve got all these different places where you’re throwing your money. And so, streaming in the past has really kind of been an afterthought for marketing. It’s just like, well, we’ve got 30,000 extra. Let’s just chuck it to Hulu and hope for the best. And we don’t really have any metrics to see on the back end of that. So that’s really where we come in, in that, we have a platform that brings all of the providers into one space. So it gives us the ability to set up and optimize campaigns just like you would with digital. So we can be very strategic with the customer base and the goal and the audience that you want to reach. But then on the back end of it as well, we are also measuring, we are able to measure where people go after they see your commercial.
So a commercial is shown in the home. Where are they going and what are they doing? Where on your website are they going? What pages are they visiting? Are they filling out forms? Are they applying? What are they doing? And then at the end of the day, what we’re able to do is actually measure back student inquiries, student applications, event registrations, back to were those people exposed to commercials and did they take a next step and go to your site and then do whatever? So, that’s what really makes us truly different in a nutshell, very high level, because nobody’s really doing that right now. Nobody’s measuring the engagement piece of it.
Kevin Tyler
It seems like such a logical solution in the times we’re living in right now. Do you have any like idea why it’s taken until 2025 essentially to make this a reality in higher ed?
Jennifer Lonchar
Well, you know, we’re so behind in everything that we do. And so I always say that to people, is that, in the real world of advertising, outside of our higher ed bubble where we all live, this is what’s happening. And we are always late adopters to everything. And we’re either late adopters on our own time or we’re forced, our hands are forced.
Kevin Tyler
Exactly. Exactly.
Jennifer Lonchar
COVID, you know, online advertising. We had no choice but to come online and things were slowly starting to go in that direction. Slowly is the key word, right? We are slow to adopt everything. And then our hands were forced. We had no choice with that. So then everybody’s feet were held to the fire and now everything’s online. Great, whatever. Digital advertising was the same way. And so, in my bio, when you say I was on the forefront of digital advertising, you know, back when I was at Carnegie and 2010 was kind of the magic time that we brought digital marketing to higher education. And so I joke with people and say, you know, even in my presentations at conferences and when I’m talking to clients, I say, I’m going to take you on a little time travel and we’re going to go back to the future. We’re going to go back to 2010 when I was traveling around and presenting on retargeting, which now is just the most basic of basics for digital. But back then, it was happening outside of higher ed and had been happening for years. And these companies can figure out a way to stay in front of the audience that, you know, 98% of your audience would drop off without doing anything. And they were like, wow, we can get this audience back. And lo and behold, they’re buying what they need to be buying. And so when I was talking to clients, I would say, what if we could just get 2% of students that left your website without doing anything. Would that have an impact on your numbers? And people are like, well, yeah, that would have an impact, but that’s really creepy. And I’m like, well, it’s the future. It’s where we’re going. And I mean, it took a good three years of continual, this is what you need to be doing. And like these small contracts would trickle in and people would be like, okay, we’ll spend $5,000 on digital marketing and see what it does for us. We’ll spend $10,000 on digital marketing. But yet they’re still spending a half a million dollars on billboards. And I would say, how do you measure those results? Well, we don’t know if it’s working, but we continue to do it because I think for us too, this industry, they’re scared to be the first one to make a mistake. And I think whenever something new is out, nobody wants to be the one to take the chance. I remember talking about digital way back when, and I had this client that was like, I don’t want to be your guinea pig. I don’t want to be the first one to do it. I mean, straight up said that to me. And, that school, when everyone else was doing cool stuff, they were not because he didn’t want to be the one to test things out.
What’s really cool about this is that I’m not bringing something new to the table. It is not a brand new thing. TV has been around forever. And there’s a reason why TV advertising has been around forever. Because it works. Because it’s magical in that it helps you create, it pulls on your heartstrings, right? You can do a lot of things with it. You can make people laugh. You can make people cry. It’s memorable. It does something about brand elevation. When people see your brand on TV, it’s somehow, and this is all neural marketing stuff, right, that we’re talking about. It elevates your brand in their mind. So why are we not doing this more? If you have a 30 second, this is my little elevator pitch, right? This is my one, two-sentence elevator pitch. You have a 30-second unskippable opportunity, a stage, where your school is in the spotlight, in the living room of your students and their families. So if a student and their family invited you in and said, have 30 seconds to get me more interested in your university, what would you say to me? And so this is also a change of thinking on a lot of marketers’ parts and stuff. But this is why it hasn’t been adopted, because everyone’s scared of trying new things.
The other thing I will say is that, we have a patent on our platform that has been built out for not only connection to publishers, but the measurement piece of it. We have a patent on that. So it took years and years and years to build out this platform. So it’s not something easily that somebody else could do too. So I think that having that ability to be able to measure isn’t something that other agencies are just jumping on board like, yeah, we can do that too.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that background. I think that, well, first of all, before we get into some of the other questions that I’ve prepared for our conversation. In preparing for this and in conversations that you and I have, the phrase term performance television has been kind of proposed, right? I’m curious if you can just define that real quick and what makes it different than traditional streaming if you have not already covered that in your previous answer. The idea of performance television feels like a new phrase and I want to make sure that people are understanding it as we have this conversation.
Jennifer Lonchar
Yeah, I think the hot thing that you’ve probably heard in conversations you’ve had with people is the term performance marketing. That’s really started right going around is that, you know, the idea behind that performance marketing is that you need to be able to measure all aspects of it. And ROI is on the table in every conversation and it can’t just be… I literally just got off a call where we were saying like it back in the day used to anecdotally be able to say, yeah, you can do this. Yeah, it works, whatever. But now you have to have metrics and you have to have black and white metrics to go in and go to your VP, go to the president, whatever it is, and say, I want to spend money on this and this is why, and these are the metrics, right?
Kevin Tyler
Right.
Jennifer Lonchar
You have to prove every cent now. So performance TV is proving those metrics. So not only seeing, yeah, your ad has been served up, these are the number of impressions and this is the completion rate, which is pretty much the metrics that everybody’s had on CTV and OTT in the past. But this is now saying performance wise, I’m showing you black and white. Not only do you get those metrics, right? You’re getting the transparency of the channels that your ad has been shown on. You’re getting the impressions. How many times you’re getting the completion rate on all of that. But you’re also getting performance metrics in that, how long is it actually taking people from the time they see your ad to the time that they go to your site? Is it within an hour? Is it within a day? Is it within two days? So that’s a performance metric, right? You’re also seeing secondary action breakdown. What are the pages that they’re going to on your site? What’s resonating with them and where are they going? And that’s different for every school. So I had a call yesterday with the school and I said, you know, what’s been really interesting breaking down this data for you and watching where people are going after they’re seeing your ad is that we see a lot of people going to that tuition and financial aid page.
It seems to be a big interest of your audience. Is this something that correlates with the data that you have on the back end? And they’re like, yep, absolutely, 100%. That’s the first concern of our students is cost. And it’s not like that with every other school, right? So a lot of schools we see, it might be a research institution and the biggest page that people are going to is the academics majors page. That’s what people are interested in. You might have another school, they might be a big athletic school. And so they get a ton of traffic to that type of page and things like that. Or maybe, you know, it’s a yield campaign that you’re doing. And so you want to see a bunch of engagement on “take the next step: deposit,” right? So that’s a performance metric, being able to see where people are going, what they’re interested in. And then at the end of the day, the big metrics are, let’s match back, let’s do a match back. So you send me any inquiries, applicants, deposits, event registrations that you got during the course of the campaign, send that to me. And what I will do is take those home addresses because that’s the key measurement piece there. And I will be able to tell you with certainty which students were exposed to your commercials and then went and took an action and engaged with you and did something. That’s the performance of performance TV as all of those metrics can buy it.
Kevin Tyler
That feels like very valuable data to have.
Jennifer Lonchar
Exactly. Exactly.
Kevin Tyler
We’re talking about, you know, we’ve had conversations about the search cliff and demographic cliff, all these other cliffs. And if you have a way to understand not just who you’re inviting to your funnel, but also what steps they took while they were inside of it. It feels like we have a much more precise or surgical way to approach them later on in the funnel because we’ve gotten them deeper at a very, in a quick way.
Jennifer Lonchar
Right. And, you know, one of the other things that we can do in terms of like metrics and data is for Slate clients, because we’re a Slate partner. So for our Slate schools, anyone that’s utilizing ping data, being able to take ping data from certain pages and turn around and run a demographic profile on that ping data to see like, what are the types of households? What are these people that are engaging with you? And I’m talking like unmatched ping data, right? Because the matched ones, those are students that are in your database, but there’s a lot of stealth people. You don’t know what’s going on with them. So number one, profiling them, be like, what do they look like? What types of houses are they coming from? But then two, taking that ping data and be able to push that into a TV campaign. So I know these people are visiting my pages, but let’s turn around and shove them into a campaign as well. So we make sure we stay in front of them. That’s another thing that we can do as well. So, we’re sitting on a lot of data.
One of my partners is one of the largest data companies in the country. We’re sitting on a lot of data and have access to a lot of data, which not only gives us the ability to target with that and really break down that targeting, but then also really analyze these audiences, these different segments of audiences. So you think about, like, I just did one for a school that was like, want to see all the stealth people on our nursing pages. What does that demographic look like compared to our undergrads? And do we see some real differentiators? And can we go out and find more people that obviously look like that and have an interest? Something we could do too, like lookalike stuff. So, there’s a lot of really cool stuff. then imagine just, the biggest thing I think to remember about this, what we’re doing at Ambio is that in this day and age, your television in your living room is just another digital device.
The first thing you do when you buy a TV and you plug it in, it asks you to connect to the network. And as soon as you do that, you are now connected to all of the devices within your house, which means if you search on something on your computer and your phone, I guarantee you it’s impacting the commercials that you’re seeing when you’re streaming. And so why can’t we capitalize on that in higher ed? Why are we not and why can’t we? Yeah.
Kevin Tyler
I love it. I love that. It makes all the sense in the world. And I love the way that you talk about it because it makes it not feel so scary, but I imagine that the people you encounter as maybe prospective clients, et cetera, have some significant hesitation. You mentioned one before, I don’t want to be the first or I don’t want to be the guinea pig. But what are some of the myths that marketers have around CTV, other traditional television streaming, whatever else and how does AmbioEdu address those myths that they might hold?
Jennifer Lonchar
I don’t get a lot of no’s. I mean, I really don’t. I know saying that is like…
Kevin Tyler
Well, aren’t you lucky? Look at…
Jennifer Lonchar
I know, I know because like what you just said, literally like when I explained to you how it works and all of that, you’re like, why would you not do this? Like it makes perfect sense. So when I sit down, it’s getting people to take a meeting and, we’re already doing CTV. We’re already doing OTT. Yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just listen to me for.. Give me five minutes. Give me five minutes. I probably can tell you more in five minutes to get you to the point of like, okay, maybe we’re not doing this, right? So I don’t have a lot of no’s in that area. Once I sit down and explain to them what this is and how it’s different.
I think there’s the myth, one of the biggest myths is that they can’t afford it. They’re like, we can’t afford it, right? That’s probably what you’re doing sounds so cool that it’s probably too expensive for me. That’s bullshit. It’s not. I work with schools of all different sizes. I work with schools with all different size budgets. And one of the things that irritates me about higher ed marketing and where we are now, in this space, let me tell you.
Kevin Tyler
Lay it on us.
Jennifer Lonchar
There’s a lot of things, but let me tell you one of the big things is that, companies, and there’s a reason for it. When you’re running a business, there’s a reason for things on the back end that things are done. But there’s companies out there that only want to work with the big players and the schools that have a lot of money, right? And so those are the golden children. But there are a lot more schools out there that don’t have that, right? That don’t have million-dollar budgets. That don’t have $500,000 marketing budgets. Now you have some that have $30 million marketing budgets and that’s fine. That’s great. But there is a place for small schools and there have to be companies out there that are willing to cater to schools that have smaller budgets.
I think that there’s a lot that you can do with a small budget, especially with TV. Because TV has a huge reach. The ability to be able to say, yeah, you could take $15,000, if that’s all you had and wanted to make an impact. You could do that. Now, it’s still the same as digital, in that it’s all based on how big of a geographic area do you want to reach? How many people do you want to get in front of? How long are you wanting to run this? But if you said, you know, we really have a need and we have one month to get out or, you know, I would say probably two months is a good timeframe. You know, we have two months that we really need to communicate this message to a mass amount of people. You can do it and not have to break the bank. One thing that is very apparent to me in diving into, because I’m really involved on the back end of this as well. So it’s not just like I’m out here preaching this and I don’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes. Like I get it. And the more and more campaigns we do and the more schools I work with that, they start out with a test campaign and then they expand to a larger campaign. The results follow that, right? And that’s just like any other marketing campaign. The more you put into it, the more you’re gonna get out of it. So you have to be willing to say, if we’re only spending $15,000, I’m not expecting you to solve all of my enrollment problems. But if we’re spending $15,000, you can come back to me and say like, yeah, all the inquiries and applications and everything you got during this small timeframe, Ambio exposed 40 % of those or 20 % of those even, you know, that’s still a metric that you can say, yeah, I know it worked. I know it drove these people. But if you’re spending, you know, let me just put this in relative terms, you spend $15,000 over two months or you spend $250,000 because this is your goal is to get in front of as many people and drive as many applications and traffic, you’re going to see those results correlate with that spend. So it’s all relative, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility for everybody. There’s room to play for everyone in the sandbox. And we are willing to work with small budgets.
I say to people all the time, they ask me, do you have a minimum? And I say, you know, not necessarily. The minimum is going to be, is it going to be a viable campaign for you? And is it going to get you some results? That’s all we look at. What’s your audience? This has always been, always, so over the last 17 years of my career, we talk, or I shouldn’t say 17, because we’ve been doing digital, we haven’t been doing digital that long. So let’s just say over the last 15 years. When you’re talking about setting up campaigns with schools, the conversation should always be about what is your audience? Like who’s the audience that you want to get in front of and what are the goals behind it? First and foremost are the two most important things you talk about. And then you talk about what strategies are we going to use on the back end, right? So I, you know, I would say that I don’t even know where we started with this because, you know, this leads into so many different things.
EK ad read
Kevin Tyler
I would love, if you don’t mind and are able to, for you to share like a case study, like what was the need, what was the solution and what were the results for one of your clients that you’ve worked for, with.
Jennifer Lonchar
Oh my gosh, I actually have some brand new stuff that I can share with you. Brand new.
Kevin Tyler
Love it.
Jennifer Lonchar
This one is my favorite out of all of them. And I know they won’t have a problem with me sharing this because we just talked about it and we’re actually going to write up a case study. This literally, this data came to me this week. I ran into the VP of marketing at Northeastern Illinois University, I’ve known him for a while and have worked with him in different capacities at different companies. You know, we had breakfast and you know, just like everyone else, he’s frustrated with, you know, not making numbers, things, you know, all of these things. And I said, you know what? This was in July. I said, let’s just throw a Hail Mary. Let me try, let me do something for you here at the end of the cycle, right? Like, we’re end of the cycle in July.
Now their students tend to be late students. They have a high, you know, it’s a historically minority serving institution, high Hispanic population, a lot of their students are on the non-traditional. Now, they do get students that come out of high school too, but they do have a lot of students that are working a couple of jobs to support their family and things like that. So let’s just paint that picture. That institution over the years, you know, has not met or exceeded goals in a very long time, 15 years in the case of this. So I said, let’s just throw a Hail Mary, see what we can do.
So we did two commercials for them and we can help with the creative, right? We took assets they already had on hand. We developed two commercials for them, one Spanish, one English. We took their list of accepted non-deposited students as well as we not only took that list, but we also then targeted high schools around the Chicagoland area and also focused on Hispanic households, as well. So kind of layering in multiple strategies, if you will. Ray on that.
I will tell you that they not only made their number, they exceeded their number by 4.2%, which is the first time in 15 years. And the VP of marketing said, I know it was due to this because this is the only thing we added at the end. This is it. We added this. We just had a conversation about it yesterday because I said, you made your number. I remember you telling me that you were going to make your number, which you were really surprised about. And he’s like, Jen, we didn’t just make it. We actually exceeded it by 4.2%. So that’s one story.
I have multiple yield stories like that. Old Dominion University we worked with over the summer also as well to do a yield campaign as well as targeting rising seniors. We stopped their summer melt in its tracks by doing this. We got them much closer to their enrollment goal. They were in a very happy place at the end. The same thing with Drexel University. Kind of the same thing, we drew kind of, they were very much impacted by the FAFSA situation that happened because that’s a big group of their students are high need Pell students.
So they were very much impacted. And I actually saw Dawn Medley, the VP at EduWeb in July, and she did a presentation on how they combated that FAFSA situation right away. And they hit it head on, which was great. They did a lot to get in front of it, but they still, it impacted them a lot and they were going to be down like 500 students. And so I was talking to her and she’s like, yeah, let’s try something. And you know, they’re on the quarter system. So they still had to like September 26 or something. So we did, we threw everything at doing yield and I think we ended up matching back. Again, we stopped their melt. We were able to get them additional students and they said the same thing too. This is the only thing we added. So, and their marketing guy was, it’s kind of a tough sell at the beginning because he was kind of like, we’re already working with an agency that does this. And Dawn was like, just give him a chance, let him try it. And I think he’s definitely bought in now and really enjoys working with us and stuff. And he said the same thing. He’s like, I mean, I know it worked because it’s the only thing we added here at the end. So, I think we matched back. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but when we did a match back for them, I think we matched back to, was something like, I think it was 20% of their new applicants and enrolled students that came in during that time and stuff. But then what was really interesting is we matched the stealth ping data visitors to that point in time. And it was over 56%. We were driving this traffic to their site and stuff. Not only pulling in the students that had not deposited yet, but new people, new eyes on it and stuff. Who knows how many of those could have been juniors or could have been sophomores or could have been freshmen or, you know, all of that.
Kevin Tyler
Right. Right.
Jennifer Lonchar
The magic of TV is that you’re hitting the whole household. So, you’re also starting this branding process much earlier than you normally will. Yeah, I mean, it’s the same story.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah.
Jennifer Lonchar
Sorry, Kevin. Like it’s the same story with everyone so far that we’ve talked to, like all of my clients right now that I’m working with, with the exception of one, and that is they were kind of late in the game to start this, are up double-digit percentage points in applications. I have one that is putting students on the waitlist for the first time ever because they’re up an unprecedented amount of applications. Now, I’m not saying that’s all due to us, but…
Kevin Tyler
Sure, sure.
Jennifer Lonchar
Obviously the marketing guy is very upfront with me. Like we know it, it’s in part due to working with you guys. So it works. I mean, it’s just, that’s it. I have the data black and white on the backend.
Kevin Tyler
It’s a fascinating solution. I’m curious, if you have any perspective on what AmbioEdu, how that offer influences content and how compelling the content is. We’re not using the usual brand video from an NCAA game and just like plugging it in this. I guess that could be a way to do it, but is that the right way to do it? So I’m curious what it means, for when we’re developing content for recruitment. Does your offer make mean that it needs to be way more targeted, way more compelling, way more highly produced any of those things?
Jennifer Lonchar
Yeah, so this is a conversation too and this is gonna be an ongoing learning experience for my clients.
Kevin Tyler
Sure.
Jennifer Lonchar
Because everyone, again, is so conditioned to just like what you were talking about those high-level brand videos. And there’s nothing wrong with them. They’re great.
Kevin Tyler
At all. Yes, they have a place.
Jennifer Lonchar
Yeah, nothing wrong with them at all. But, what I’m trying to change the narrative on and especially now that I’m working with enrollment people and it’s not just marketing people doing CTV OTT. Now I’m pulling in the enrollment folks and saying, this is now an enrollment tool for you that you can use at various points in the funnel. You know, you can’t have a higher ed conversation without talking about a funnel at some point.
Kevin Tyler
You can’t say that word. You have to see the “f” word when you’re talking about higher ed, the “f” word.
Jennifer Lonchar
Exactly. Yes. So, when we’re talking about the funnel, this can be used at various points in your funnel. So now, and this, again, goes back to me changing the narrative of like, if you had 30 seconds and you were invited into someone’s living room, you wouldn’t just come in and dribble a basketball around and be like with your sweatshirt on and be like, okay, peace out. And be like, I think that student is going to apply, right?
Kevin Tyler
Right.
Jennifer Lonchar
No, that’s not going to work. But if you say to that student in 30 seconds, you know, when you come here, you’re part of a family and we treat our family like this, and we will hold your hand throughout the entire process, if that’s the type of school that you are. If your message needs to be about affordability and that, you know, like NEIU is a great example of that, in that most of their students graduate with no debt. That’s like unheard of in this day and age, right? If you let me in and I tell you, I’ll get you through four years of college, not only by, you know, holding you accountable and being there to make sure that you’ve come to class. But then you’re also going to graduate with a degree and not have any debt. And this is a student who’s supporting their family and working three jobs.
Kevin Tyler
Right.
Jennifer Lonchar
I mean, that right there. So it’s changing the narrative and saying, you can say a lot in 30 seconds. You could say a lot in 30 seconds. So, please, don’t just do a drone footage of your school and three kids under a tree. We always joke about that. The three kids under a tree with a backpack, you know, a group of multicultural students walking across campus. Like, have students testimonials.
Kevin Tyler
It’s old.
Jennifer Lonchar
It’s old.
Kevin Tyler
Those days are old. And you can say a lot of things in 30 minutes, doesn’t mean you have to say all of the things in 30 minutes.
Jennifer Lonchar
Exactly. So this is funny. I’ll take this back. And I think you and I talked about this and I think I told you about like when I was on Jamie Hunt’s podcast and we came up with the idea of like a perfect commercial about school is about so much more than just class sizes and number of majors and all those things. You know, you meet your best friends, some of your best friends in life you meet in college. Your roommate. You could meet your husband, your wife, your significant other. People that stay with you throughout all the various seasons of your lifetime. So, create a commercial around that. Showcase the different seasons of your life and that how college changed that for you. And I don’t care what kind of a college it is that you go to. You could go to a vocational school, a tech school, a community college, a four-year university. It’s going to change your life. So tell people how it’s going to change their life and what it’s going to do for them. Say that and talk just like this. Like we’re having a conversation. You’re in their living room. Like talk to them like you’re in their living room. I guarantee you, you will have a huge impact with that type of commercial more so than you would with just a branding commercial.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Jennifer Lonchar
So that’s my big message to everyone. There you go. PSA.
Kevin Tyler
So for folks who might not know about, without getting super wonky or way into the weeds, how the targeting actually happens that you are doing. Can you just go over how AmbioEdu tailors or targets institutional messaging to core audiences?
Jennifer Lonchar
Yeah, so everything we do, without giving away the farm, everything we do is rooted in the household ID. So all of the devices that they mentioned before, all devices are connected within that household, right? There’s a lot of mapping and stuff that happens on the backend for us to make sure things line up. But we’re able to target on a very granular level with demographic information, obviously. That information is out there. And so targeting at the household level by demographic information, but then also loading in behavioral, contextual, what people that are interested in .edu, education, it’s all very, very similar to digital marketing.
We’ve gone out, we’ve polygoned, which is drawing a virtual fence around a building location, if you will. We’ve polygoned every high school, every community college, every university in the country, and have been maintaining a database that we constantly update and refresh of mobile device IDs. So we’re able to take those mobile device IDs and from that, we know, because like I said before, all devices in a household are connected. So we know what household that device is associated with.
Very similar to what a lot of companies are doing, mobile footprinting type things with digital advertising. It’s similar, only now we’re able to put TV commercials across all devices in that household. Demographic information, first party targeting remains a huge piece of what we do for higher education. So being able to do list-based targeting and things like that. So, it’s, again, a lot of it goes back to digital, but the ability to be able to, with certainty at the end of the day, be able to match up that data.
We are collecting, when commercials are shown in the household, there’s a lot of data on the backend that we’re collecting that we use and are able to keep within our platform that allows us to do the matchbacks. But in terms of targeting, I would say, sky’s the limit. Lookalike audiences, so we could run a demographic profile on, let’s say, all of your students that have graduated. So your last four years of students.
Let’s say we take their home addresses, we run some demographic profiling on that, create a lookalike audience, because those are the students that have stayed, they’ve been through the gauntlet, they’ve graduated. You want more of those. So let’s do a lookalike audience, find households that look like that, but then let’s layer in other things. Like we want to make sure they have a 16 to 18 year old living in them. Okay, that narrows down your focus. We want to focus on discretionary income levels. So we layer in that on top of that. We only want, like you did this look alike, great, but we only then want this decile for discretionary income. So there’s a lot of different things we can do and get very granular with that to make sure that we’re hitting those right households.
Kevin Tyler
Jen, I would like to ask you, is there a retention play here that institutions could use as, don’t forget how good we are. We’re glad that you’re here or whatever it is. I feel like there is a retention strategy that could be leveraged here because they’re all on your campus at this point and they might need kind of refresher content delivered to them in ways that feel new and compelling. Is that something that you’ve done before? Is it worth discussing?
Jennifer Lonchar
Yes, it is. I think there’s definitely a play for that. And we do have one school right now that he’s doing it for a couple of different reasons. He’s doing it to help retention, again, there’s that brand affinity thing. Yes, you can target your own campus. You could layer in. You would be targeting the location of that campus, right? Anybody that’s there. so, and one thing too, you can just.
Kevin Tyler
Right.
Jennifer Lonchar
Anybody that’s there. When data comes into play, I think the one thing people need to know about Ambio, just really quick, and I will throw this in there, we’re not collecting any data. We’re not sharing any data. We’re not, everything that’s done is already, like you think about mobile device IDs, it’s just a bunch of letters and numbers. There’s literally nothing personal attached to that. When we do stuff with home address, it’s literally just the street address, city, state, zip. There is no personal identifiable information that is attached to anything that we do there. We don’t transfer any data back and forth. I get this question all the time. So, nothing. So there’s nothing in there. It’s all just letters and numbers and a bunch of device graph mapping on the back end that happens. Nothing’s collected.
Retention purposes. You could target campus. Yes, you could do that. The other thing that I think that is good for is getting in front of various stakeholders. Board of Trustee members, presidents, faculty, because I think a big thing with marketing, they say it all the time to me, is that we could be spending a gazillion dollars on marketing and our faculty would be like, you don’t do anything. What do you do? We never see your ads.
Kevin Tyler
I haven’t seen your ad anywhere.
Jennifer Lonchar
Exactly. Oh, but I saw the billboard on the Expressway when I came in today. Woo, good job marketing, right? And they’re just like, I just want to bang my head against the wall. So they’re like, yeah, let’s see the faculty, let’s throw them in, let’s target the campus. So, I do think that’s a good idea. You definitely could do that. You could use it for retention purposes. Obviously, I would like to see more schools doing stuff around retention because I don’t think we do enough of that.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah, same. I agree.
Jennifer Lonchar
Yeah. So absolutely. This could be used really, Kevin, like you could use this for anything. I mean, think about advancement.
Kevin Tyler
Advancement, all of that. Yeah, totally.
Jennifer Lonchar (40:30.034)
alumni advancement fundraising. Like you’ve got your alumni addresses already. Could be putting commercials in front of them about giving back to the school that gave them everything.
Kevin Tyler
Exactly.
Jennifer Lonchar
Right? So yeah, you can use it for everything. And we’re using it very much throughout the entire enrollment cycle, doing ads to push applications in the fall, doing ads for Learn More right now for rising seniors, doing confirm your enrollment ads for yield right now, doing transfer ads. We’re doing military targeting. We can target military bases and being able for those schools that have great money for veterans and for those in the military. Yeah, you can use it for so many different things. Those schools that need creative help, just to give you a rough idea what it costs to do a commercial with assets that you already have available and on hand to you that we can put together in a beautiful 30 second spot is, cost roughly around like $6,000 to do like two different variations. It’s not a ton of money. It’s not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. And then you own the rights to that. You can take that commercial and put it wherever you want.
So yeah, the sky’s the limit on what you can do with it. And we’re at the tip of the iceberg right now.
Kevin Tyler
So cool.
Jennifer Lonchar
Yeah, international. That’s the other thing. Yeah, international is tough because their budgets aren’t huge. They don’t have a ton of money.
Kevin Tyler
Sure.
Jennifer Lonchar
But if there ever was a concerted effort for a school to, say, really want to grow our international population and we’re going to devote some money to that, we can do streaming campaigns internationally. It has grown exponentially, especially in India. And that’s where we’re getting a lot of students right now. Capitalize on that. Like they’re streaming in India. And I would say for international, I did a lot with international when I was at Carnegie. And I’d say it hasn’t changed in terms of one of the biggest things with international students is just seeing the brand out there and just seeing that school. And even so seeing them in digital ads was a huge thing. Now, when they see them on TV, you must be a really good school if you’re on TV, if I’m seeing you.
Kevin Tyler
Right.
TVP ad read
Kevin Tyler
The other thing that this brings to mind is I’m thinking about the states like Idaho, Utah, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, on some level, where we’ve had these kind of collaborations across campuses who are trying to reposition the value of higher education within the state as a whole. And I feel like there is an opportunity here for states to target these households with maybe middle school, early high school to say, don’t forget, like college is an option and it’s a viable one, right? And here’s the messaging around that. And here are the institutions that are contributing to this effort. And I feel like it makes messaging about the industry feel so much easier than having to make a bunch of view books and go to your state legislature and go advocate whatever this, this and that. It feels like a new way to talk about the value of the ROI of higher education as an idea, as an industry, as an offer before even getting to the brand level of it.
Jennifer Lonchar
I think you just like lobbed me a softball. You want me to like get this out of the park based on conversations that we’ve had in the past. That was unplanned, totally unplanned, but like I’m eating it up. I’m eating it up. Well, cause I think, you know, like you and I have talked about this, this is a super passionate thing for me in that, you know, we talk about all the different cliffs and I think Emily Smith from CollegeVine coined it when we were on a, when I did the vine down with her and we were talking about the perception cliff, right?
Kevin Tyler
Yes.
Jennifer Lonchar
The perception of higher ed, the value of higher ed in this country and the problem that we have had that has just been gaining momentum over the last 30 years and it started small and it’s just been gaining and gaining and gaining. And there’s a concerted effort by certain entities out there to dumb down America, dumb down, you know, where we’re going. And one of the biggest things I think is going after higher ed and going after the value of a degree. And we, at the same time, are our own worst enemy because we’re on one hand saying, yeah, go to college, go to college. You need college, you need school, you need education. But then we’re also pricing ourselves out to the common person and making it like, where is it gonna be? I have a friend who’s got a daughter who’s five and he said, he’s in higher ed, he’s a VP, and he said, you know, it scares the heck out of me to think when she’s 18, what higher ed’s gonna look like in terms of the cost, down the road, and is the common person gonna be able to afford a degree? So, we’re saying both things, which is hard, but I think collectively, as an organization, as a higher education organization and network of people collectively, yeah. We need to be following suit of some of these states that are doing that and have gotten on together and pooled some of their money and said, we’re not going to be so insular in our messaging. It’s not about me. It’s about us collectively. Right. And if us, the idea of higher ed for us as a group goes away, then I’m absolutely going to be affected. So we’ve gotten to a point now that we need to start thinking bigger and you know, yeah, it’s important to still do your own marketing and think about yourself.
Kevin Tyler
Of course.
Jennifer Lonchar
You can’t ever not do that. But there also needs to be this little part over here that goes, okay, how do I contribute to the bigger picture? How do I see the forest through the trees and see what’s happening on the larger level? And if we don’t save higher education together, then we’re all in trouble.
Kevin Tyler
Right, my brand, my brand messaging, it doesn’t matter.
Jennifer Lonchar
It’s not just 100%. Then it’s not just gonna be a couple schools that are gonna sink. It’s gonna be a couple hundred, a couple thousand schools that sink, right?
So again, we tend to not do things until they bite us in the butt. And you can quantify the enrollment cliff that’s out there. Cause those numbers, they’re numbers, just black and white. You can quantify that. So you know what to prepare for. You know, on the backend, I need to bring in this many students, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what’s going to happen is the perception cliff, you can’t quantify that. And so it might not happen next year. It might not happen until the year after, but it’s going to catch up.
And if we don’t do anything about it and it keeps going in that direction, eventually we’re going to say, well, we plan for everything. We did our numbers. We did all the math. Like we know we should have made our class this year. We didn’t make our class and we don’t know why. Well, could it be because of this? Because this is a number that none of us can quantify. My tool, what I have, is a perfect vessel to get, not tootin’ my own horn, but TV. It’s CTV and direct channel placement and all of that stuff, it’s a perfect vessel for getting out that higher ed message. It doesn’t matter where you go and what you do, but be a lifelong learner, stay in school. I don’t know how old you are…
Kevin Tyler
Very old.
Jennifer Lonchar
I’m very old too. And I remember the stay in school messages of the eighties, the nineties that we heard all the time. You know, not say no to drugs, but stay in school too. And we’re at that same place. Be a lifelong learner, commit to keeping yourself educated. And there is a value to that and where education can take you. You know, I go back to like reading rainbow after school. Like I think that was always a message at the end was like, education can take you to greater places and all of that. We need to go back to that again, to get people to realize that value and that, yeah, you have to pay for it, but there’s ways that you can get help for that. It’s gonna take you places and we collectively, if we don’t do it…
Kevin Tyler
Yeah, and I mean…
Jennifer Lonchar
It would be another conversation.
Kevin Tyler
That’s a whole, that’s a part two episode. But I think about the things like this, all the news around TikTok and obviously X is what it is now and how what was once a very reliable way for brand messaging to be distributed among audiences or to audiences is now becoming kind of warped or perverted in such a way where someone now owns a thing that changes the entire way it’s used or engaged with or whatever, but advertising seems to withstand all of that. Like television advertising as opposed to chasing your target audiences from platform to platform, trying to be wherever they are, which is a natural kind of marketing practice. But when the politics kind of bleed into places like TikTok and X andFacebook and whatever else is going to happen. Going back to television, it presents a really great opportunity for extending or expanding your message in a reliable way. And so, I feel like the timing of this conversation is right. And it feels like a really important opportunity for higher education.
Jennifer Lonchar
You literally hit the nail on the head. I think that outside of higher ed, that’s where things are going and marketers and advertisers outside of higher ed, this is why they’re jumping on the bandwagon because they are like, okay, we’ve worn out digital. Like it still works. And I’m never going to come in and say, don’t do digital advertising. You gotta, you gotta do it, but it’s a very crowded space. There’s so many things at play now. And so.
And this generation of students, not only Gen Z, but this now Generation Alpha that’s coming up, like all of these students, they have learned how to tune out the noise. And they’re also streaming everything. So they’re still watching TV. Nobody’s never going to not watch TV as entertainment, as a form of entertainment. And why do we like TikTok? I personally love TikTok. If TikTok goes away, I will be literally crushed. And I have not watched the news. I’ve not watched a day of the news since the election. I haven’t. I’ve been one of those people that’s just dropped it. I watch TikTok, but I’m also fiercely like I’m a librarian’s daughter. And my mother was doing and teaching media literacy back before media literacy was really a thing, which it is now. My mom was teaching it way back in the early 90s when it was just brand new. So I have been taught my whole life to fact check everything and to do my research and all of that. So I still do that even with TikTok. I see something I don’t take it at, you know, I take it for face value. But why do we like TikTok? Because it’s, think about it, it’s engaging content, it’s video, it’s speaking right to us. The algorithm is set up in a way that it’s showing me stuff that I’m interested in, where I am in my life. How is a commercial that different? If someone’s watching a show that they love and you are able to get in front of them and say something of interest to them, we are drawn to that as human beings. We want that engaging content. I don’t care anymore about static ads. I see static, I scroll, scroll, scroll. I don’t care. Give me something that I can relate to that’s going to talk to me. Marketers outside of higher education, they’ve got it. They’re on it.
I mean, and it’s just my partners just came back from CES, which is one of the largest consumer electronic conference, right?
Kevin Tyler
It’s huge.
Jennifer Lonchar
They all just came back from that and said, it’s just going to continue. I mean, TV is just going to get bigger. Advertising is just going to get bigger on TV. Like they know it. They’ve got the pulse on the market. Again, we’re sitting over here and like, la la la la la la la la, doing our own higher ed thing. It’s coming. It’s coming. Yeah.
Kevin Tyler
To run the program. And you may have already answered this, but I’d love to contain it as a response to the question that I ask every guest who comes on to Higher Voltage. What do you think higher education is going to look like in five or 10 years?
Jennifer Lonchar
Do you want the, like, optimistic answer or do you want like the, I feel like it’s probably going to look like what it looks like right now because five years ago it kind of looked like what it looks like right now.
Kevin Tyler
That’s fair.
I mean, again, we’re slow to adapt. We’re slow to change. You know, there’s a lot of things at play. That’s a loaded question because there’s a lot of things at play.
Kevin Tyler
Totally, totally loaded.
Jennifer Lonchar
What happens on Monday could change the whole face of our industry. Not for the good.
Kevin Tyler
Yep. I think that’s just as fair of an answer as any of other answers we’ve gotten to that question. I think that it’s really interesting to hear which part of the question someone picks to respond to, because sometimes it’s a marketing answer, sometimes it’s an industry answer, sometimes it’s something, a political answer, sometimes it’s something else. They are all valid responses because we don’t know what the hell it’s going to look like in five or 10 years. Things are only going to change at a more rapid rate as we get closer to that timeline. And higher ed will have less of an opportunity to catch up with it because things will be just churning, churning, churning along and at some point might grow around the industry as a whole, which is what I do not want to have happen. But we have to take an action. I think you’re exactly right. One of the themes that has come out of this kind of section of content that we’ve been releasing around technology and innovation has been that higher ed has a tendency to not change itself unless it is absolutely forced to, unless we have suffered so many cuts and bruises that is the only solution. But what I’m hoping happens is that we can take a bit of a more proactive approach to our own evolution as opposed to it being kind of a punishment.
Jennifer Lonchar
Yes. Yeah, no, I agree with you. Absolutely. And I will say this too, like money is not, you know, the money isn’t getting any bigger, budgets are not growing at all. I want schools, what I’d like schools to kind of figure out how to work smarter and not harder with things, because they’re going to have to continue to use the resources that they have. They’re not getting anything new. So you need to be able to partner with someone who’s an innovator. And I think the other thing too is that, you know, picking the right partner, I think is important. So one thing I do want to say to people if, you know, they listen to this is that you don’t know what you don’t know. If this podcast has been any proof to anybody, like I’m talking about new and different stuff, but you don’t know what you don’t know, especially when it comes to vendor partners that are out there, because there are a lot of very cool vendor partners that are offering new and innovative things.
And I’ve had various conversations with them. And the challenge is always the same in that schools have gotten complacent and comfortable with who they’re working with, which might be like a bigger company. And they’re like, yeah, we’re doing this. Yeah, we’re fine. Yep. It’s like kind of on rinse and repeat with everything. When you go to somewhere like NACAC, if you’re a school, I hope you go past the big booze at the front of the conference center and you make your way towards the back or towards the middle because there’s a lot of smaller companies out there that I’ve had the opportunity to talk to. I’m like, man, what you’re doing is blowing my mind. And there are some companies out there that are doing some things that will really help with enrollment and with marketing and things like that. But they just, they’re like, the hardest thing is just getting people to just take a meeting with us and just listen, you know? So that’s my spiel with that.
Kevin Tyler
Oh, girl, listen, I always have a small business shout out. Yeah, I love that you just said that. I hope that folks take heed. Jennifer Lonchar, thank you so much for being here with me today. I think that these kinds of conversations, I’m excited about them because I know digital, but not at the level that you know digital. And I really enjoyed learning from folks who know as much as you do, especially for an industry that I care so much about that feels like it has so many opportunities in this space to take advantage of. It’s kind of an honor to me to be kind of a vehicle for some of these conversations or this knowledge, because I am learning and also hopefully building up the fluency and sophistication of an industry that is so important to me.
Jennifer Lonchar
I love it and I appreciate you having me on and anybody who’s had me on as a guest on a podcast or whatever it is. I mean, any opportunity, I feel like we do so much good, we really do. And at the end of the day, I can feel good about what I do for a living because I feel like we’re changing people’s lives. It’s step in between here and there from what I do, but at the end of the day, that’s what we’re doing.
And I think we forget that sometimes. I think we forget, you know, we all, it’s not just me, everyone gets caught up in numbers and goals and all of these things, but at the end of the day, you know, those numbers that you’re bringing in are actual human beings that are making a life altering decision.
Kevin Tyler
That’s exactly right.
Jennifer Lonchar
And we all need to remember that too. But so, we can have an impact, good, bad, you know, whatever, hopefully all for all the good. I hope in five years, Kevin, that we’re going in the right direction, that things are going well. I’m just going to remain, I think I told you in my little bubble of positivity that I try to stay in. I’m just going to try to stay positive about it.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah, I heard that. Same. Where can folks get in touch with you if they have questions or are interested in learning more about what AmbioEdu can do for them?
Jennifer Lonchar
Yeah, come to my website, AmbioEdu, A-M-B-I-O-E-D-U dot com. Ambio means surround, by the way. There’s a method and a meaning behind our name, surrounding students. So come to AmbioEdu, reach out to me, schedule a meeting. I would love to talk to anybody just like this. down, chit chat. I want to hear your problems. Let me be your therapist.
Kevin Tyler
Jennifer, thank you so much. Super great conversation.
Jennifer Lonchar
Thanks. Thanks, Kevin.
