The New Rules of Acquisition (with Frank-Lamont Wade)

What happens when performance marketing principles intersect with one of the longest and most complex customer journeys in marketing? This is Nourna Seer for At Tech & Filtered. And on this episode, I sit down with Frank Lamont-Waith, Director of Performance Marketing at the University of Phoenix to discuss the realities of marketing in higher education. We explore attribution across extended decision cycles, aligning stakeholders around measurement, the growing role of AI in marketing operations, and why understanding human behavior still matters more than any technology.

Frank shares practical lessons from the education sector that apply far beyond it, offering a thoughtful perspective on performance, patience, and what it really takes to drive meaningful outcomes. Let's get into this episode with Frank now. Frank, I know you've got a good history in the performance marketing space, so I'm excited to talk to you about it today. Yeah, I'm excited to have this conversation with you.

Thank you for inviting me. I want to hear about how this transition occurred where you brought this existing legacy of performance marketing skills over to University of Phoenix. I think you were telling me earlier how you have a history of working across a variety of verticals in performance marketing. But specifically, what was adapting those skills to the higher education space at University of Phoenix?

What did that look like for you? Yeah, developing the skills and then transferring them over to the university is interesting because they have a lot of regulations and interesting particularities that, let's say, insurance or maybe, you know, like retail doesn't have. And so it was fun, like crafting a strategy for the university and then coming on full time to bring that to life. It's a completely different animal focusing on higher education.

You've been with the University of Phoenix for a minute now. What are observations that you've made that really distinguish higher education from other verticals and industries? Yeah, absolutely. I would say that some of the main differences between higher education and other industries is that this is highly optional, but also for the demographic that the University of Phoenix focuses on, we're not necessarily focusing on just like college for everybody, not because we don't offer that.

But the person that comes to University of Phoenix is specifically looking for value in terms of time, career development, things of that nature. They're normally a bit more of a mature audience. And so focusing on like that smaller segment of users means that we really have to deliver a high amount of value to their life overall and for the rest of their life and their family's lives in order to be successful as opposed to, you know, some generalized upper universities could just say, hey, if you get a degree, you're going to make more money in the long run.

And they might just be able to grab anybody that's looking for a degree or they have some other prestigious thing that they're going to be able to offer to their students. But for us, we have to be able to be accessible and we have to be able to offer that value long term for that person almost like directly in order for it to be the value that they want to pursue. Frank, you were also telling me earlier how you joined the University of Phoenix at an interesting time in history.

How have you noticed evolution across that ride, especially given the fact that you joined them at this unique moment in the last, let's say, five to seven years? Yeah absolutely It been a fun time at the University of Phoenix for sure You know like we had the pandemic and that right when I started and that transformed the entire landscape probably across the world but an education for sure And being able to see the results of helping people get degrees and, you know, putting ads in front of people at the right time so that way they can further pursue their goals and their dreams and like better their lives is a really wonderful feeling.

and the performance changes that we had to make in order to compete with everybody else that's joining the space. And then, you know, the aftermath of when society goes back to walking outside, it's been a huge shift, both from creative standpoint and a measurement standpoint, and then also just getting the work done standpoint. So it's been good. I'm also wanting to ask you about segmentation.

It's a question I've been asking a couple folks from a brand marketing standpoint. It's impossible to not think about it, especially as a brand marketer, what does segmentation uniquely look like when you're evaluating higher education, but it's in the online education space? Great question. So first, we have our segments that we generally know work, you know, the people that we generally want to focus on.

But we also just challenge those assumptions all the time. You know, we try to go ahead and test with broader audiences and evaluate who are we missing? What's incremental? What's net new to the university?

Do we have anything to offer those people that we don't normally focus on? And is there ever going to be performance there? And we have to not think about a click today to, you know, a student tomorrow, but a click today or an ad today might lead to a student in two years, three years, four years, five years. So we always have the broader horizon and scope when we're testing out those segments and then just try to evaluate over time, you know, are we still favorable to those segments, especially if they're ones that we don't normally consider.

It's a long runway in some cases, right? You're not thinking about somebody you're trying to pick up in the next week or even the next year, right? If we're talking about something that's four or five years out, that lends itself to my next question, which is doing optimization, testing, especially given some of these long ramps of time we're looking at. How does that affect how you go about executing your optimization strategy?

Well, we just don't want to throw away the baby with the bathwater, if you know what I mean. We definitely care about getting good acquisition costs, and we definitely want students today. Like we have goals to hit and we have people to report to, but ultimately speaking, you know, we want to make sure that the brand is doing the right thing in all facets, right? So we really try to take the most appropriate approach that we can to running the ads and the strategy to make sure that we both have the long-term vision in mind, even though we may be aimed at a short-term goal at the time.

And so trying to balance those budgets and those strategies are always top of mind. Like they're never not in consideration. What you just said lent itself to this next question, which is what really is your approach to balancing volume goals with quality leads in student acquisition campaigns? Yeah, most marketers will know that if you're aiming towards volume, quality can suffer.

And if you focus only on quality, then volume might suffer. And so finding that balance is going to be unique for each brand and every marketer in order to try to get that mix. For us, all we really can do is just try to enhance the signals that we can provide to our teams in order to suggest quality. Because the more signals we have, as opposed to relying on like one marker, then the better we'll be able to also generate that volume.

And so I would say that measurement and attribution have been like a really huge focus on like attributing that high quality to the lead that allows us to keep that volume flowing in When you a performance marketer sensitivity to every indicator that you can possibly pick up on is essential How do you keep that really thorough analysis of making sure you're picking up on as many variables as you can so you can influence future campaigns? I love that question because there's an overwhelming amount of them either from our internal data sets or external data sets for sure.

I'd say that trying to triangulate them on the things that matter. At the end of the day, we have to focus on the student to the best of our ability. And so it's just which students do we serve? How are we serving them best?

Which of our students get the best results? And what of that's in our control? And as we can back all of that out, that's way more significant than saying, well, we got a bunch of potential students from a certain state. That's far less important than overlapping the qualitative data, let's say, that really makes up the student themselves and trying to focus on that.

So I would say that, yeah, trying to focus on like triangulating what matters most for us to be the best solution for our customers is where we try to figure out what traits, like what segments do we focus on in order to develop that path. I also want to ask about the variety of digital channels that you could be investing in. Social, search, programmatic, streaming, they can all be a part of helping deliver strong results, but you need to rationalize what you're going to invest in and how much.

What does that conversation look like internally for you as the leader of performance marketing? It's a difficult conversation for sure, and it's definitely across a majority of the team as to what it is that we're going to do. We have a great analytics team that helps us with that by building out, you know, multimedia models and our mixed media models and all kinds of different things that we can evaluate in order to determine some performance. We certainly want to focus, you know, all the way throughout the funnel from the lowest end to search to the highest end to, you know, like, let's say a billboard or TV, something of that nature.

So we just try to diversify and then just like evaluate testing. If we spent X amount of dollars, what might we hypothesize would be the result from that? And if it doesn't work, you know, we don't like lick our wounds and we just simply move on to the next test knowing that we learned something and we're going to adapt to that and then like move forward. And so we have a healthy amount of diversity within our media spend that allows us to continue to test.

And, you know, our team is really good at coming up with hypotheses and working with other vendors and things of that nature to develop those hypotheses. So that way we can continue to test and figure out how we want to spend those budgets. But it's a very collaborative effort. I think it can be easy for a marketer, especially from a performance standpoint, to say, well, let's put every dollar we possibly can into search, right?

We want to find people who are actively searching for our brand because we know those people are definitively suggesting their intention. But you know, from a performance marketing and just marketing standpoint at large, that that's not the standalone solution. Are there any go-to points that you bring to the table to have that conversation? Yeah well this is what I say our leadership great and they understand so you know all the way up to the top they understand and they know just like you stated you know search is going to get the job done to a certain extent because it where the intent is but they also understand that if you don fill the funnel then nothing trickles down to the bottom of the funnel And so fortunately, I don't have the uphill battle that some marketers have with wanting to invest in some other channels.

But I will say that when there is something more adventurous that we want to test, a little bit more outside of the norm, then we have to focus on some other things like incrementality, brand lift studies, you know, GOX studies, different type of measurable outcomes that we can say, hey, we might not get a potential student out of this that we can easily measure, but maybe we can focus on how many branded searches increased this month or something, you know, some other, I don't want to say obscure, but tertiary goal that's equally important in the long run.

You can't be grateful enough to be in an environment where the leadership is accepting of the fact that it can't just be all one thing, right? There's the openness to testing. Yes. Our leadership is encouraging of testing, actually.

Yeah, I would say that they're really good about it. Steve Gross, Michael Grimm, like Ryan Udani, like the whole Laura Schmidt, like everybody over there. And like the list goes on and on. Like it's really a tier one class of just performance marketers across the board.

I'll end our conversation on this question. What types of skills do you think that the performance marketer of today or the performance marketer of tomorrow needs to adapt so that they can be successful as a performance marketer? I think that for me, I would say that it's definitely going to be like critical thinking skills for sure. The more that you can look at a situation and identify it as a puzzle that needs to be solved and the higher level of tenacity you have in order to solve that puzzle, the better off you'll be because there's so much psychology, economics mathematics science behind all of the marketing that we do that to say like well everybody just needs to be like the most well-rounded person altogether is probably not super realistic right like everybody's going to have their flaws but i think that if you can look at a situation and just like take a step back and say like what am i missing or what is everybody else missing can i challenge leadership can i challenge my superior to say like maybe we should think about this a different way then i think you're going to find a lot of opportunity there that's just potentially missed.

And hopefully you're in an environment where you're working with leadership that will listen and be able to say like, yeah, let's try to break this down a different way and work with you to solve the problem as opposed to create roadblocks. But critical thinking and openness like all throughout the chain, I think is probably what's going to lead to the next generation of best marketers. It sounds like there's a great team over at the University of Phoenix and that's really such a critical part of making the work effective from a performance marketing standpoint and beyond.

So we'll have to see what shows up in the future as you continue your career path at University of Phoenix. Yeah, absolutely. I look forward to it. And I'll give you an update the next time I see you.

Sounds great. Hi, thanks again to Frank Lamont Wade for joining to share his perspective on navigating long customer journeys and building meaningful measurement frameworks and balancing technology with a deep understanding of human behavior. As Frank reminded us, successful marketing isn't always about finding faster paths to conversion. Sometimes it's about creating the right experiences, earning trust over time, and staying disciplined in how we measure success.

If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe and share the episode with a colleague. Until next time, I'm Norma Sear for AdTech Unfiltered. More episodes coming out real soon.