Justin Sonnenreich

Tag: campus marketing

  • Why Students Are the Most Undervalued Growth Channel in America

    The numbers, from public sources: US back-to-college spending was estimated at $88.8 billion (NRF, 2025); there are roughly 19 million US college students (SheerID/NCES); and the weeks around move-in are when a person opens their first bank account, first brokerage, first delivery subscription — the habits that persist for decades.

    Meanwhile, digital CAC keeps inflating (average e-commerce CAC $68–84; CPMs up ~20% year over year), and Gen Z is the demographic most likely to be unreachable there anyway: ad-blocked, feed-skeptical, and trained to trust peers over polish.

    So why is campus still undervalued? Because it doesn’t scale like a slider. It requires humans, logistics, and semester rhythms — operational advantages, not media-buying advantages. That’s precisely why it stays cheap: the brands that treat campus as an ops problem (staffing, tracking, verification, operators with territories) buy customers at prices the feed hasn’t seen in a decade — and lock up campuses their competitors can’t rent back. The math is here: what a $5 verified account means.

    Sources & mentions

  • How a Campus Activation Actually Runs: Staffing, Tracking, Verification

    Brands imagine a campus activation as a folding table and some free merch. Here’s what’s actually running underneath when it’s done professionally.

    Staffing

    A trained student operator owns the campus; ambassadors staff the table in shifts around their class schedules. Everyone has been through the playbook: pitch scripts, compliance rules (no misleading claims, no signup pressure, IDs where age matters), and capture duties — every activation is also a content shoot.

    Tracking

    Every operator gets unique links and codes per location and shift. That gives the brand attribution to the table, the day, and the person — which is how per-result pricing stays honest, and how we learn which spots on which campuses convert (dining hall > quad, Tuesday > Friday, move-in week > everything).

    Verification

    The number we invoice is the number that survives checks: the action is defined pre-launch (funded account, KYC-passed signup, activated subscription), our dashboard is reconciled against the brand’s, and anomalies get investigated before anyone bills anything. A human watching a real student complete a real signup is the strongest anti-fraud layer in acquisition marketing — that’s the whole point of the CPA math.

    Want the version with your brand’s numbers in it? Start with a pilot.

  • What a $5 Verified Student Account Actually Means: The CPA Math

    Let me show you the math that makes campus activations a different asset class from ads — using only public numbers.

    The public benchmarks

    • Robinhood’s own affiliate program pays $5 per qualified lead and $20 per funded account, publicly listed, uncapped.
    • Fintech referral programs routinely pay users $75–150 per funded account (SoFi) and ~$100 two-sided bonuses (Chime) — check their current program pages.
    • Average e-commerce customer acquisition cost runs $68–84 and paid CPMs rose roughly 20% last year across major platforms.

    Now hold those against what a trained student operator produces at a tabling activation: verified, KYC-passed accounts, acquired in person, at single-digit to low-double-digit dollars per account depending on the action. We’ve delivered funded investing accounts for a top-5 US investing app at around $5 per verified account on campus. (Client name and full data shared in calls with permission — we don’t publish what we can’t attribute.)

    Why campus CPA beats the feed

    1. No fraud tax. A human at a table watching a signup happen is the strongest verification layer in marketing. 2. No auction inflation. Your competitor can outbid your CPM tomorrow; they can’t outbid a relationship with the operator who runs your campus. 3. Lifetime-value timing. You acquire customers in the exact week they form habits — first bank account, first brokerage, first delivery subscription. The switch costs later are your moat.

    The honest caveat: campus doesn’t scale like a budget slider. It scales campus by campus, operator by operator — which is why we built the operator model, and why brands that move early lock up territories that are simply gone later.

    If your growth team wants the full model against your current CAC: the pilot is one campus, one semester, pay per verified account.

    Sources & mentions

  • Inside the UNC Chapel Hill Campaign: 4–5 Intro Calls per Student, per Week

    Most of our campus work is brands trying to reach students. This one was the other direction: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — my own school — using MarkitAds‘ outreach system, MarkitOutreach, to connect its people with the outside world.

    The setup

    MarkitOutreach is our done-for-you outreach engine: list building, personalization, sending infrastructure, reply handling and booking, run as a managed service. For the UNC engagement, the goal was consistent, qualified introductory conversations — the kind that turn into partnerships, placements and pipeline — without the students doing the grinding themselves.

    The result

    4–5 introductory calls per participating student, per week, sustained across the engagement — a pipeline most professionals would be happy with, generated for students. The full write-up lives on the MarkitAds site: markitads.com/our-work/unc.

    Why this case matters more than its size

    First: the client is a university — the institution whose trust every campus marketer claims to deserve. Working for UNC, inside the rules, is a different credential than working around a campus. Second: it proves the general thesis I keep coming back to — students are an undervalued channel in both directions. Brands undervalue reaching them; institutions undervalue what systematic outreach can do for them.

    And it’s the reason our campus activation work (the pilot) starts from respect for the campus: we ran outreach for a university before we ever asked one to tolerate us.

    Sources & mentions