How Texas A&M Takes Big Brand Swings
R. Ethan Braden is the chief marketing and communications officer at Texas A&M University. He reports to the president and runs a 70-person team across five marketing pillars, after coming up through marketing at Eli Lilly and Purdue.
We’ve become friends through Exit Five’s executive community, and at dinner at Drive, I asked him: why don’t more B2B marketing execs do what you’re doing?
Unlike what you might think, his goals aren’t recruitment. With 85K applicants for 15K seats a year, Texas A&M doesn’t have an admissions problem, it has a perception problem: up to 40% of America has no opinion of it at all. For Ethan, whose aim is to make A&M impossible to ignore, that’s the challenge.
More targeted ads won’t fix that. Ethan’s answer is what he calls strategic presence: reach the audiences you need to win in rooms where you’re the only one there. He skips highway billboards and airport security bins and goes where fans are already engaged. So relatable for B2B, where there’s so much competition and noise. Here’s how Ethan makes every bold bet count.
Show up in spaces your audience loves (but your competitors haven’t found yet)
Ethan’s goal is to insert A&M into the national conversation – and not just about football. He wants federal agencies, companies, research partners, and journalists calling A&M for research, talent, and expertise. A&M already has incredible equity in Texas, so the question was how to reach an engaged national audience with no other university in the room. One answer: NASCAR.
NASCAR has 80 million fans who are getting younger, more diverse, and more national, and they’re more brand-attached than fans of any other major sport. A&M isn’t there to talk about racing, though. The sport runs on engineering, aerodynamics, and data, the work behind A&M’s $1.5 billion in research. Its biggest weekends are patriotic ones, which fits a school that calls itself the number one veteran-serving university in America.
Pick the right moment
A&M is an associate sponsor of the Haas Factory Team and only goes big on races where the moment matches its story. You just need the right moment.
Back in my Drift days, we wanted the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square but couldn’t afford a full day, so I bought 15 minutes for $17K and brought video and camera crews. (And no, nobody on LinkedIn asked whether we had it all day!)
At the 2025 Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day weekend, the most patriotic race on the calendar, A&M sponsored the full car. Its windshield carried the name of Captain Ronald Forrester, an Aggie and Marine listed as MIA in Vietnam, whose remains came home after 51 years. His family was at the race, and the story of America’s top veteran-serving university reached 2.7 million viewers.
Moments like this are built: A&M chose the race, the car, and the story. Others can’t be planned, and you only get them if you’ve been pouring in long enough, consistently enough. Memorial Day weekend also hosts the Indy 500, and that’s where A&M’s consistency caught lightning in a bottle.
Make your brand a lightning rod, so you’re ready when it strikes
A&M’s other big motorsports play is IndyCar, which runs 18 race weekends a year on Fox and just had its most-watched season in nearly two decades. A&M sponsors driver Felix Rosenqvist, through what Ethan calls a valuable piece of real estate: the back of his helmet, which viewers see from the in-car camera.
A&M showed up on that helmet race after race, starting in 2025 and through all 18 races this season. Then this May, Rosenqvist came out of the final turn of the Indy 500 and won by 0.0233 seconds, the closest finish in the race’s 110-year history, with A&M on his helmet in front of 6.6 million viewers.
“Marketing can’t create the lightning, but it can create the lightning rod,” Ethan says. His job is to put A&M where the extraordinary can happen, and Felix brought the lightning.
We all want the lightning strike right away. Most of us aren’t willing to put in the reps and the time in market it takes to get one.
The win sent people searching for A&M, and in Ethan’s words, that opened the door. Now the team has to walk through it, because getting noticed is only half of it. The other half is helping people understand what A&M stands for, “together as a force for good.” A sponsorship puts your logo in front of millions, while a partnership lets you tell a story together.
Rosenqvist’s helmet, with Texas A&M’s logo where the in-car camera can see it.
Use partnerships to tell your story to a new crowd, and give them something they didn’t expect
A&M’s SXSW play shows what a partnership can do that your own event can’t: put you in front of people who don’t already know you. A&M used to spend a pretty penny on its own Ag House there, but only Ags showed up, so it was preaching to the choir.
For the last three years, A&M has been part of the Fast Company Grill instead, right across the street from the JW Marriott in downtown Austin. That puts it in front of SXSW’s smart, innovative crowd, most of whom would never walk into an Ag House. Inside, you won’t see football. You’ll see A&M’s work in space, health, farming, and national security on full display.
It went so well that Fast Company added a full A&M-focused day, and people routinely walk out saying they had no idea A&M was doing this kind of work. That’s the big swing: getting in front of people who don’t know you yet, and delighting them with a story they never saw coming.
This is basically product marketing! When you’re known for one thing, you have to go show people the rest of the story.
Take the big swings. If I were a CMO right now (I’m not anymore, so feel free to roll your eyes), this is exactly the stuff I’d be thinking about, not micro optimizations with AI. It’s big brand plays that change how people think and feel about you. So many more great takeaways and lessons in the full pod with Ethan on YouTube.
