Bill Shorten’s team certainly know how to start a conversation.
Whether that conversation heads off in a constructive direction, or is grounded in the right context is another question, and not altogether within control of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra – but new ways of trumpeting old chestnuts has got to be a good thing.
The decision then, to announce a new brand campaign developed on a shoestring for UC and then seek to make a virtue not of the campaign, but of the small size of the spend is strategic and interesting.
Not strategic in a marketing sense of course, as very few of UC’s potential students will see the press release or stories like this – but strategic in positioning UC to regulators and government, seeking to look fiscally responsible and perhaps attract more plaudits (or even the odd stray coin) from government.
Around $2.7 million will be spent on rolling out the U CAN campaign this year, which is a sizeable budget if you don’t sink too much into the creative agency producing it, but UC claims it, “is expected to remain amongst the lowest ranked universities for marketing and advertising spend in 2026.”
Of course, the campaign spend is much lower than many other universities, but Professor Shorten points to a 2025 report which purports to show UC has the lowest spending on marketing of any university in Australia, based pm data from 2023 annual reports. The problem here is that, as any HE CFO will tell you, totting up the correct sum for how much an institution spends in any area, let alone marketing, is complex and variable depending on issues such as accounting conventions and internal structures. Mapping those figures across all universities, let alone all tertiary institutions, is a really significant challenge – and the data is not going to magically appear annual reports.
For example, does the institution map the amount spend on salaries plus the cost of making and purchasing ads, or just the ad cost? Does it include communications campaigns, internal and external (eg the sign on the door telling students the toilets are closed for cleaning, the mental health support line ad in the staff newsletter or the hours that communications person spent re-writing a speech so that industry would understand and bother to listen to your latest breakthrough on carbon sequestration). Does it include Faculty spend? And what about the cost calculations for academic staff time spent on marketing, when you have cut down the central marketing team and they have to do it in the few minutes they previously had spare to do research?
Setting aside issues with benchmarking of total spend, there is also a widespread misconception that marketing spend should correlate to enrolment growth in the following year. There are many issues with this.
Firstly, there is often a lag in marketing spend, particularly in spend on brand. Secondly, there are many factors that colour and institution’s reputation, and sometimes marketing spend is required to overcome misconceptions or plain dislike. Third, the marketing performance may have peaked and spend is required to maintain enrolments rather than grow them. Fourth, the institution may not be seeking to grow enrolments, but instead raise the average of student capability (ie get school leavers at higher ATAR cutoffs). Fifth, the institution may be investing in growing diversity of cohort, which is far more expensive than just taking the nearest groups ready to attend. Sixth, the courses on offer may be inferior to those of competitors in terms of perceived value proposition so you might need to spend more to gain an equal footing. Seventh, there may not be capacity for growth in some areas, and a need to focus growth on disciplines or campuses that are not in demand. I won’t go on.
Suffice to say, quantum of marketing spend is not a proxy for virtue and does a disservice to the professionalism and sophistication that higher education marketing and recruitment staff possess.
You hopefully will see very little of the U CAN campaign; not so much because of the size of the budget, but rather, that if it’s targeted well, you aren’t the target market they are after, anyway. Unless you happen to be looking to study right now, or have a nearest and dearest you can influence to do so, your eyeballs are what the marketing world would call ‘waste’. No offence intended.
By airing conversations that have long been muttered and only occasionally said out loud about HE marketing, Professor Shorten's team does us all a favour – providing the opportunity to discuss in the open festering misconceptions that have fuelled discontent with the pantomime villains of HE – marketing departments – for years. And also a selection of new – and old – ideas that are only garnering discussion within the sector after passing across the desk of a certain former Opposition Leader;, who seeks to make a virtue of not being cut from the same cloth as his peers.
“Time has come to stop worshipping sandstone, its just a rock after all,” Professor Shorten said.
“Rather than have a cringe factor and say you take people with a pulse, we say we want to take people with a heart.”
“We are not going to accept a status given to us by anybody else, we are going to take our own path.”
Mr Shorten said research conducted prior to the campaign revealed diminished social licence, a sense that university degrees are too expensive, that universities don't cater for adults and that sandstone universities are too elitist for many.
"The image of unviersities can do with some improvement collectively and this is our contribution," he said.
The campaign will roll out from next month, aiming to lure students from Sydney and Melbourne as well as from the core constituency in and around the ACT.