Make Something Worth Remembering for Humans and Machines
This article is adapted from a talk first presented at SimpsonScarbrough’s CMOLab 2025 in New Orleans.
Let me be blunt: being a CMO in higher education right now is like piloting a hot air balloon through a meteor shower. You’re no longer just running campaigns and dodging budget cuts; you’re actively shaping how your institution is perceived by two very different, but equally important, audiences: people and machines.
Students, parents, alums? Yes. But also: large language models. AI. Algorithmic ghostwriters. The robots. These audiences are not waiting around for your strategic plans to catch up.
From Synthetic Audiences to Agentic Influence
A few months ago, things got real for me. Reya Calistes, our head of research, casually dropped the concept of synthetic audiences on me. I nodded like I knew what she meant, but inside? Panic. Synthetic audiences? I was picturing mannequins in a focus group.
Then it hit me. She was talking about personas made not of flesh and blood, but of training data and probability trees. Not students, but simulations of students. Mathematically plausible, digitally conjured versions of them. Like I said, things got real. This unlocked a series of concepts, and I’ve been trying to codify them since.
We’ve spent years building personas like “George, the junior from Chicago,” or “Alicia, the adult learner in Phoenix.” Now there’s a new persona in the mix, and it’s not even a person.
It’s the machine.
AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are the ones fielding questions like:
- “What’s the best nursing school in the Midwest?”
- “Which colleges are most generous to transfers?”
- “Is [your school] any good for veterans?”
And the kicker? They’re not pulling answers from your homepage. They’re pulling content from across the web, assembling an answer from information they believe is credible, structured, and relevant. Some of it comes from your website, but not all of it. They cite a few sources and tailor their responses to the persona of the person asking the question.
Which means: you’re no longer just marketing to people who search. You’re marketing to the machines that answer.
Introducing “Share of Model”
Now here’s where it gets even more fun. A recent Harvard Business Review article broke down a term that CMOs need to pay attention to: Share of Model. Move over, share of voice, share of search. Share of Model, coined by Jack Smyth, a strategist at the digital agency Jellyfish, is about how much of your brand is lodged inside the working memory of an AI.
In other words, how often does the model mention you? Cite you? Recommend you? (And you might ask ChatGPT for the best higher education marketing agencies, if you’re so bold.)
It’s like trying to win a popularity contest with the world’s most distracted librarian. And that librarian? She’s reading everything. All at once. Forever.
Your Website Is Your Brand’s Human Frontier
Now let’s swerve hard into the human side of things. Because for all the data-slinging and model-optimizing, there’s still one irreplaceable thing you can do that machines can’t: make people feel something.
Think about it. Students don’t enroll because an AI told them to. They enroll because something resonated. A story. A spark. A sense of “this place gets me.”
That spark doesn’t live in your information architecture. It lives in your experience.
Nike gets this. They don’t have a website; they have dozens. Each crafted for a different person, a different vibe. One for sneakerheads in Tokyo. Another for teen runners in the Midwest. And each one? A story you can step into.
Higher ed, meanwhile, tends to build one Frankenstein site. Or worse, a graveyard of abandoned microsites and orphaned program pages. At its worst, it’s a digital strip mall of sadness. At its best, a high-rise with great wayfinding.
If the robots are doing the talking, then the experiences you create are the last thing that’s truly yours. Let’s make it unforgettable.
Where Models Meet Memory
To thrive in this new world, we need a two-pronged playbook:
- Optimize for Share of Model: Make your .edu domain structurally sound, semantically rich, and absolutely irresistible to crawlers. Treat every page like it’s being read by a robot with a photographic memory.
- Build Human-Level Moments: Design digital experiences that make people feel seen, valued, and inspired. Create the kinds of moments that AI can’t fake and people won’t forget.
This isn’t about choosing sides. It’s about knowing how to speak both languages.
Closing Thought
The future belongs to the brave. Not the loudest. Not the busiest. But the ones bold enough to shape what comes next. For the models, and for the humans.
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