The Evolution of an Enrollment Management Consultant: How Innovation Ads Became Associated with Higher Education
The Evolution of an Enrollment Management Consultant: How Innovation Ads Became Associated with Higher Education
Patrick Sutton
December 4, 2006
Forward
Innovation Ads is committed to maintaining integrity and best practice in the education marketing industry. We are committed to providing streamlined, performance based solutions to enrollment marketing that will cut cost, de-segment the marketing process, boost return-on-investment, and provide more accountability for the advertising spend universities incur.
History
Innovation Ads was founded in 2002 as an advertising agency. Iain Grae and Michael Lastoria (president, CEO) started the company with the idea to sell advertising space in the back seats of taxi-cabs in the New York area. After quickly learning that the TLC was not the easiest bureaucracy to navigate from the bottom up, they began thinking of other creative ways to advertise.
In October of 2006 Innovation Ads was acquired by Seaport Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in providing value-added partnerships to media and information companies. I mention this acquisition as a summary for the success of Innovation Ads. Iain and Michael are still active in the company on a daily basis.
In the time between 2002 and 2006 Innovation Ads operated as an interactive direct marketing agency. In that time the company grew in terms of human capital, and technological infrastructure. Innovation Ads was immensely successful in lead generation through online advertising.
The successful generation and sale of leads across various tiers necessitated the creation and refinement of the technological core of Innovation Ads—The Enrollment Solutions Platform, or ESP. ESP is a system that allows clients to track the success of advertising campaigns real-time. Clients can see which ads are successful at which locations across the internet. In addition, a further-refined version of ESP allows for realtime automated optimization of advertising campaigns: if the system notices that a particular advertisement-publisher combination is not generating successful leads, the advertisement is automatically placed with another publisher, until the best advertisement-publisher combination is achieved. In addition to the technological infrastructure, Innovation Ads added a call center that can convert the leads that any advertising campaign generates.
In the spring-summer of 2006 Innovation Ads ran an end-to-end enrollment management campaign for a large not-for-profit university. Immediately, Iain and Michael saw how the company they had developed—a lead generation firm with a call center—is a perfect fit for Enrollment Management in higher education.
Present: Innovation Ads as a Comprehensive Enrollment Management Solutions Provider
Innovation Ads has seen how a poorly executed higher-education marketing campaign can have devastating effects on the functionality of the school, and the reputation of the school. Most universities can’t afford to aggressively pursue advertising campaigns for 2 reasons:
- it is inefficient to bombard the consumer with images
- the front-end operations of the university may not be able to handle the increased demand
The two sides of any school—the back-end (business) and the front end (education)—need to be synchronized and working in unison, even if the two don't see eye to eye.
For example: a successful advertising campaign may increase student enrollments to such an extent that there are not enough professors to address increased demand.
How Innovation Ads helps academic institutions to meet enrollment goals
Our mission is to help reduce the Enrollment Management operating costs of education institutions. Because we have the technological means to identify students that have expressed interest in higher education, we do not need a massive marketing campaign to generate leads. We can provide the exact number of students needed, on a performance basis. We function as an end-to end marketing solution: we generate leads, we convert leads, and we meet enrollment benchmarks. All of these services are carried out on a performance basis, while ensuring the profile and functionality of the university are not affected in a negative manner.
Want to learn more about Enrollment Management? Click here to sign up for the Innovation Ads Enrollment Management Whitepaper.
Please contact Innovation Ads at 212-509-5218 to find out how we can work together.