Your Mission Won’t Save You, and No One Is Coming …
Myla Edmond got tired of hearing that students don't read. So she put 35 people in a room and counted every general message the university sent an incoming first-year student in one year. The number was 273.
Myla is senior vice president at EducationDynamics, where she helped build the fractional CMCO offering and now serves as the interim marketing leader institutions bring in when they're between hires, or unsure they want one. She's also a published poet. Her career thesis is one word, congruence: the gap between who an institution says it is and who it is, and whose job it is to close it.
In this Icons episode, Myla explains why marketers are the mirrors, why she'd rather change the institution than the copy, and why she stopped attaching herself to the outcome. It's a conversation about what awareness is worth when nobody has to act on it, and what a marketing leader owes an institution that has been raised to wait for someone else to decide.
🔑 What You'll Take Away
Why "students don't read" is a sentence that leaves you with nothing, and what she found when she stopped accepting it
The 273-message audit: how she ran it, what it exposed, and why it didn't survive her departure
What to change when the institution and the message don't match, and why she picks the institution every time
Her honest answer on fractional CMCOs: transition coverage done right, or a trial no other VP has to pass
The question she asks before every piece of work, and the 65-page magazine it killed
Her read on the industry and the three things institutions keep waiting for someone else to do